


Easy As Anything

by komodobits



Series: Easy!verse [1]
Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, I don't know jack shit about space or science and I don't care to be corrected, M/M, Rivals to Lovers, Slow Burn, canon adjacent, constant bickering, idiotic humour, increasingly inventive ways to have sex with someone with no body, pining by the boatload, rimmer is a service top if anyone will ever agree to have sex with him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:00:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 141,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22899139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/komodobits/pseuds/komodobits
Summary: Sex isn’t supposed to be this difficult. Maybe they’re just really bad at it.
Relationships: Arnold Rimmer/Original Female Character(s), Dave Lister/Ace Rimmer, Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer, Nirvanah Crane/Arnold Rimmer
Series: Easy!verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2086269
Comments: 131
Kudos: 243





	1. Alive

**Author's Note:**

> This started off as a '5 times they had sex and it sucked, and one time it was good', and then unsurprisingly, it spiralled wildly out of control. If you're not into reading about idiots with one braincell just constantly doing the horizontal tango and falling in love along the way, this probably won't be for you.
> 
> For A - who introduced me to a stupid space comedy so that I could jump on the bandwagon 30 years late, and for reminding me where the On-Switch is for caring about telling stories, and for being the best part of my own story

**I**

Lister wishes he could blame it on being wasted, but the ugly truth is that he’s stone cold sober the first time he sleeps with Rimmer. He has no excuse.

It starts with the two of them arguing—no surprises there—because Lister’s trying to get over Kochanski with that fit new mechanical aide, and Rimmer calls her the easiest thing on the ship, and Lister calls him a misogynist, and Rimmer says she makes _Biff & Chip_ look like _War & Peace_, and Lister protests that she’s not ‘easy’, anyway, or she wouldn’t have turned him down, and Rimmer actually agrees.

“You’re right,” he says. “She’s not the easiest thing on the ship—you are.”

“Me?” Lister splutters. “I’m not easy!”

“You’d sleep with anything that sat still long enough. You could be bought by a mouldy cheese sandwich.”

“Piss off.”

“There are single-cell organisms who are pickier about their reproductive partners than you. I don’t think you’re even fussed about finding a pulse.”

“I’m not an animal, man!”

“Too right. Animals have standards. And here, I can prove it.” Rimmer strides purposefully across the room, bends to dig about in his cupboard, and then pulls out a flat package wrapped in foil and plastic.

Lister looks between Rimmer and the package. “Is that what I think it is? Is that… a naan bread?”

Rimmer turns it over to read the back. “Mm. Garlic and coriander.”

Lister tries not to look wistful, but he’s staring. “They’re nice, them.”

“Past its sell-by date, I’m afraid.”

“That doesn’t mean nothing anyway.”

Rimmer holds the naan bread up in one hand. “Lister,” he says, in precisely the smug, toady way that makes Lister want to push him out an airlock, “will you make sweet love to me?”

That’s when Lister’s brain sort of short-circuits. “You what?”

“You heard me.”

Lister’s eyes narrow. “You tell me every single day that I’m disgusting. What the smeg would you wanna have sex with me for?”

“The only reason I ever want to do anything, Lister—to prove a point.”

“You’ve lost it.”

“And by contrast, you, my friend, have everything to gain. A delicious, three-month out-of-date garlic naan, and what’s more, a night in Paradise with the greatest lover in human history.”

“Why,” Lister asks, “who’re you inviting?”

Rimmer’s face sours. He levels him with a flat look, and weirdly enough, _that_ —the pissy, tight expression like he’s considering getting his report book out again—is what makes Lister pause and actually consider it.

The facts are these:

  1. He’s not got off with anyone in the six weeks and three days (who’s counting?) since Kochanski dumped him, and he’s pretty starving for something other than his right hand and the occasional thumb up his arse when he’s feeling adventurous,
  2. Rimmer is warm and human, or something close to it, and he’s here and he’s willing, and Lister doesn’t take much to get fired up, so even Rimmer would be hard-pressed to cock it up,
  3. Rimmer’s not even bad-looking, technically,
  4. Maybe if Rimmer had a shag, he wouldn’t be such a monumental twonk, and
  5. So sue him—Lister’s curious.



Lister hesitates. “So… you’d actually want to do it, then?”

Rimmer sniffs disdainfully. “I don’t _want_ to do it, in much the same way that heroic scientists don’t really _want_ to infect themselves with a deadly flesh-eating pathogen in order to safeguard the future of humanity—but sometimes, Lister, sacrifices must be made.”

This ‘proving a point’ schtick is getting pretty tenuous. But hey—smeg it. Lister pulls a face. “Alright,” he says, after a beat, hands on hips. “You’re on.”

Rimmer blinks. “I’m what now?” His voice shoots an octave high.

“You’re… on. Come on, you’re all talk, Mr. Big Man, so let’s do it. Come over here and blow my mind.”

Rimmer’s mouth opens and closes several times in quick succession. Otherwise, he doesn’t move. He says, “I didn’t mean _now_.”

Lister gives him a withering look. “Oh, yeah? Are you busy at the minute? Got some pencils to sharpen?”

Rimmer says, “No,” with vehement force, but he doesn’t actually have a clear answer for Lister. He fumbles for an excuse, and then, at last, rather feebly, he says, “I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

Lister snorts. “As if. Now come on—"

“No! You come over here.”

“Hey, you’re meant to be the one seducing me!”

“And I did a bang-up job, I think, so now it’s your turn to—"

“Christ alive,” Lister mutters, and just to shut Rimmer up, he gets up, crosses the room—ignoring the way that Rimmer backs up a step in panic—and he kisses him on the mouth.

It is exactly like kissing a communal ironing board. Rigid, unmoving, cold, a little sweaty. Rimmer’s upper lip is unpleasantly damp. Still, at least he’s not talking.

Lister lifts up onto his tiptoes, gets a hand around the back of Rimmer’s neck, and somehow that only makes him stiffen up further, jerking back a little with an odd squeak. “God, will you relax?” Lister mutters against his mouth.

“I am relaxed, I’m very relaxed, I’m the most relaxed I’ve ever been—”

Lister slides a hand up into Rimmer’s ridiculous, fluffy hair, and his mouth falls open as if shocked, and from there it’s easy enough to kiss the idiot properly. Finally—smegging _finally_ —Rimmer engages, one tentative and clammy hand on Lister’s arm, his participation taking them quickly past sensual and right out the other side into the wettest snog Lister’s ever had. Too much tongue, a bit of the washing machine effect, but he pulls Lister closer, and for all his faults—all his many, _many_ faults—Rimmer is ticking the boxes. He’s warm, solid, and when Lister pushes a thigh between Rimmer’s legs, he can feel that he’s already half-hard against his hip.

“There we go,” Lister murmurs, and he gets Rimmer’s hips in his hands and steers him backwards towards the bunks. “Come on—bed?”

Rimmer yanks his head back. “Not in my bed,” he says petulantly. “I’ve just washed the sheets.”

God, he’s totally pathetic. Lister just looks at him, exasperated. “What, you really want to get in _my_ sheets?”

Rimmer’s mouth snaps shut. “Point taken.” He gives a dramatic flourish with one hand. “In you get.”

Shaking his head, Lister lets him go and ducks in, flopping down onto the hard mattress. He has to do an inelegant little shimmy ‘til his back’s up against the wall, but he compensates by peeling out of his jacket—and by the end of it, Rimmer is still standing ineptly where Lister left him. Lister raises his eyebrows. “You coming or what?”

“I don’t have to do this,” Rimmer says loudly. His hands are fidgeting at his sides. He’s still holding the naan bread in one hand. “I have standards. I’m out of your league—miles out of your league. Light-years.”

Lister rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a stud. Come _on_ , Rimmer.”

Rimmer doesn’t move, and Lister relents.

“You alright?” he asks, suddenly feeling exhausted. Smegging hell, if he can’t even land Rimmer, he’s going to kill himself. “We don’t have to, you know.”

But Rimmer’s nothing if not stubborn, and that gets him crawling into the bed and half into Lister’s lap. Bolstered by something—determination not to be out-done, maybe—Rimmer grabs Lister’s face and kisses him again. There is a click of teeth, and Lister nearly knees him in the bollocks trying to get closer, and Rimmer bangs his head against the upper bunk with a lot of swearing, and that’s when Lister drags him down onto the mattress. All flailing arms, Rimmer fumbles out of his shirt and tie, and Lister jerks his own T-shirt over his head, and suddenly it’s really happening. Lister’s got his mouth on Rimmer’s throat and Rimmer is breathing unsteadily, his hips held back delicately from Lister’s while he struggles with his belt.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Lister says, impatient, and eventually he smacks Rimmer’s hands out of the way and takes over. “God, I’d hate to see you try to work a bra.”

“I can handle a bra just fine,” Rimmer snaps. “You’re just—oh.” His voice goes funny, and one of his hands finds Lister’s shoulder and squeezes tight. “Alright. Yes, alright.”

Lister has his hand down the front of Rimmer’s trousers, belt open, zip worked down, and Rimmer’s hard in his starched-and-ironed underpants, and Lister’s seen him naked loads of times before, but he doesn’t reckon he’s ever actually wanted to see him out of his kit before. Lister actually wants to touch him, heat curling low in his gut, and so he yanks at the hem of Rimmer’s undershirt until he gets the hint and squirms out of it. Lister actually quite fancies him when he’s like this—flushed pink up from his chest to his jaw, hair wild, mouth open and breathing heavy.

Rimmer has his hand on Lister’s jaw to kiss him hard enough that Lister half-wonders if Rimmer’s going for his fillings, and then his hand shifts to the nape of his neck, and Rimmer’s breath catches with a long groan. “God—Lister—you’re so...”

Lister kisses the corner of his mouth, drags his mouth down to the edge of his jaw. “Yeah?”

“...so… greasy.”

Lister stops. Not a good groan, then. 

Rimmer is still breathless, flushed, and also looking at Lister with lip-curling disgust. “When was the last time you washed?”

“Drop dead, Rimmer.”

“I’ll get right on that when available. Tad busy, now.”

“Are you fuck—I’m doing all the work.”

Rimmer scoffs. “It’s difficult for me to get involved when everything I try to hold onto feels like something you could scoop out of the frying pan after a particularly oily cooked breakfast. Just give me a heads-up if you’re planning to take us anywhere an open flame.” He pauses, leans back from Lister theatrically. “ _Here lies Dave Lister: barbecued by his own poor hygiene. Reluctant cremation. He is remembered by the pile of near-sentient socks he_ —"

Lister drops his head to smash his face into Rimmer’s shoulder like maybe he can knock himself unconscious and out of this experience. “Rimmer,” he says, voice strained, “you’re making it really hard for me to stay interested in you.”

Rimmer bristles. “It’s hardly my fault if—”

Lister clamps one hand over Rimmer’s mouth and pushes the other deep into those hideous Y-fronts, and when Lister gets hold of Rimmer’s dick, the garbled sound of Rimmer still droning on is cut off by a sort of squeak. There is one thing in life that Lister’s pretty confident in, and it’s this—he knows his way around a wank.

It’s easy, falling into rhythms that he likes best, sweeping his thumb over the head of his dick to spread the wetness there, and Rimmer is the quietest he’s ever been, his breathing hitching beneath Lister’s palm, hips lifting helplessly into Lister’s touch. Lister would drop dead before ever saying anything about Rimmer was sexy, but it’s alright, this. Lister is almost painfully hard against the zip of his trousers, and the wet warmth of Rimmer’s breath on his palm makes him wonder if he could find a more interesting way to shut Rimmer up—that’s an idea he puts away for another time, this bunk way too cramped for the adjustments that would require—as if there’s going to be another bloody time—but for now, he wants Rimmer’s hands on him. He wants, badly.

Letting go of Rimmer’s face, Lister plants a hand on the mattress beside Rimmer’s head, and takes a deep, steadying breath. “Oi, you want to give us a hand, or what?”

Rimmer takes a long moment to focus on him, and then just stares like Lister is speaking Greek, blank and uncomprehending. “Come again?”

“Come on, Rimmer,” Lister says, and he’s not going to beg, but he’s getting desperate here. His hand slows where he is still jacking Rimmer off, and he glances pointedly downwards. “Give and take, man.”

Rimmer blinks, and slowly, understanding flickers into his face. Then he actually _huffs_ , like he’s so hard done by that someone might have the audacity to remind him that mutual masturbation is meant to be fucking mutual, but he mutters, “Oh, alright.” He props himself up onto his elbows, and he takes over from Lister, one slow stroke and then holds himself off with his fingers tight at the base of his dick, and he’s still breathing ragged, chest heaving as he props himself up on his elbows, and that’s a visual Lister’s going to have seared onto his brain for the rest of his life, and not even in a bad way. Rimmer eyes Lister working at his buckle, one eyebrow cocked. “I’m not going to find any fungus growing down there, am I?”

Lister doesn’t dignify that with an answer, just rolls his eyes as he sits back—twats his head against the top bunk, swears—and gets his trousers down. It’s a relief that punches a soft breath from him, and he pushes his hand into his boxers to adjust himself, and then the unthinkable happens.

As Lister is sorting himself out, he touches himself just a bit—to take the edge off—and then Rimmer starts wanking off in earnest again, and Lister has only just hooked a thumb into the waistband of his boxers to drop trou when the noises that Rimmer is making suddenly change. 

A shaky breath—a gasp—a grunt—a choked, _Lister, shit_ — _oh, oh, I_ — _geronimo_ —and Rimmer comes.

Lister stops dead, mouth dropping open.

Rimmer jerks helplessly like a puppet with the strings and limbs mismatched, his hips jack-knifing, and then he rides out the wave, lying back shaky and red-faced, expression glazed.

Scratch that about fancying Rimmer. He could strangle him.

“Are you,” Lister says, slow and dangerous, “smegging serious?”

Rimmer’s mouth is hanging open. Lister watches his throat work, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. “Sorry,” he says, and doesn’t sound even remotely sorry. His voice is slightly hoarse, and very self-satisfied.

Lister sits back on his heels, and he stares away, across to the other side of their room. He wipes a slow hand down over his face, says, “It’s fine, it happens,” and turns back to Rimmer, ready to resume until Lister gets his—and finds Rimmer snoring.

For just a minute, he thinks that if he murdered and disembowelled Rimmer right now, a jury would not find him guilty. 

“You bastard,” Lister tells him. “You total smegging bastard.”

Then again, didn’t Lister know what he was getting himself into? What kind of Grade-A imbecile would agree to shag Arnold Rimmer and then be pissed off with what he gets? He doesn’t know what possessed him.

Lister reaches over Rimmer’s angelic, sleeping face to grab a handful of his bedsheets, and roughly wipes his armpits with them before he gets out of bed. He winces as he stands up, adjusts himself gingerly, and goes off to have an ice-cold shower, although not before digging deep into his left nostril and wiping his findings on Rimmer’s tie.

Well, experiment done. He is never doing this again.

***

The question that keeps spinning around in Lister’s head is—why Rimmer? _Why_ Rimmer? Why _Rimmer_? Not only the worst person in the world, not only the guy he works eight hours a day with, not only _technically_ his superior (as he gets reminded hourly), but also his _room-mate._ In an ideal world, he’d like to never see Rimmer again, and not just because the smeghead in question has recently added an extra couple of flourishes onto his Space Corps salute, taking it up to a full two-minute duration, but as it is, he’s trapped with him almost 24/7.

He gets woken up every morning at six AM by Rimmer doing loud, exaggerated calisthenics in the middle of the floor; he is kept up late at night by the sound of Rimmer listening to droning tapes that recite the laws of thermodynamics over and over; he goes to take a shit and finds that Rimmer has used a biro to mark out exactly how much bog roll Lister is allowed to use (“ _four inches, no more, no less!”);_ Rimmer irons his socks on the table, and measures his parting in the morning with a protractor, and refuses to wash Lister’s dirty laundry for him when Lister sneaks it into his pile, and writes Lister up on report about fifty times a day, only now he also says, _sorry to break your heart, Listy dearest, but rules are rules_.

For some reason, Lister had stupidly deluded himself into thinking that this might change things, might make Rimmer less of a total smeghead, but if anything, it makes him worse. He’s still an arrogant, jumped-up, pompous, self-centred, insufferable, know-it-all wanker, but there’s the added bonus that now Rimmer knows Lister fancies him. And the worst part is that Lister _doesn’t_ , not really—Rimmer was right, he really will have sex with anything, naan bread or no naan bread—but just try telling that to the smuggest bastard in the known universe.

Of course, Lister doesn’t tell the guys—he doesn’t have a death wish, for him or for Rimmer, and he knows he’d never hear the end of it, like it isn’t enough to have had the worst shag of his life with the most unbearable human being in existence, without also having his mates laugh at him for it, too. He has to live with the debilitating shame of that terrible decision, and that’s all the suffering he needs. So it’s a secret, sort of by accident, between the two of them, and a weird one at that.

Sometimes he glances across the canteen at where Rimmer is sitting, on his own and picking forcefully at his food, or glaring at his report book while he writes up one of the catering team, and Listers remembers that he knows what Rimmer looks like breathless on his back and wanking himself off. Those moments are surreal—like missing a step on the way downstairs, where his stomach sort of lifts and he feels a bit off-balance, unreal.

Other times, when they’re trogging round the upper decks, making a tour of the vending machines, and Rimmer is loudly marvelling about _the certain mechanical beauty inherent in a perfectly executed hot soup order_ , it’s all Lister can do not to put Rimmer’s head in the drinks tray and hold him there until the thrashing stops.

“—not that you’d understand, Lister… you wouldn’t know true majesty—and I mean, true, real majesty, like a sunrise, or a mighty Scandinavian fjord, or the seductive gleam of a well-polished shoe—”

Lister wrinkles his nose.

“—well, you wouldn’t know if it kicked down the door and asked you for the men’s lavatory. But regardless, there is a certain something about being able to just sit back, content in the knowledge that the inner machinations of some well-oiled A.I. can produce exactly what you most desire in the world, from nothing.”

Lister gives the vending machine in question a thump with the side of his fist. “Scrambled eggs, please.” The vending machine coughs a thin thread of blue smoke, and then drops a raw egg to smash at the bottom of the chute. Lister lifts the hand now splattered with sticky raw egg white, and he meets Rimmer’s eyes. “Yeah, it’s magical.”

He goes to slap his eggy hand on Rimmer’s forehead, but Rimmer jerks backwards out of reach just in time. Lister wipes clean instead with a rag draped over the handle of the maintenance trolley instead, and bends to peer again into all those beautiful inner machinations.

“Well, it is when it works. You just don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You do it, then.”

“Ah, would that I could.” Rimmer rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet, his voice so smug that Lister can just picture his shit-eating expression even when his head is buried in the bowels of the vending machine. “Tragically, today is my turn with the clipboard, and that leaves fiddling-about-with-wires duty to you.”

“You’re not even doing anything with the smegging clipboard,” Lister mutters.

“And yet you and I both know that the clipboard is an important responsibility…”

Lister shakes his head. He pulls his head back, holds his hand out for Rimmer. “Screwdriver?”

“So many checklists to complete. So many measurements to take. So many readings to—”

“Screwdriver, Rimmer,” Lister says, louder.

“What? Oh.”

Rimmer hands it over, and Lister makes a few minor adjustments before screwing the plate back over the internal wiring. “Give it a whirl.”

“Raspberry lemonade,” Rimmer says.

The vending machine clanks, coughs again, and there is an ominous rattling sound which makes Lister wince, expecting a faceful of sticky pop, but then it goes quiet—and produces a perfect bottle of pink lemonade, condensation forming on the cold glass.

“Class.” Lister dusts off his hands, replaces the front panel, and straightens up. He holds out his hand expectantly.

Rimmer, only half paying attention as he jots something down on his clipboard, passes him the lemonade. He doesn’t even sneer as Lister burps after he chugs it.

“Right, what’s next?”

With an absent humming noise, Rimmer flips over to the next page. “Dodgy electrics in one of the supply rooms—an alarm, looks like. Won’t shut up.”

“Bet you can sympathise.”

Rimmer’s eyes flick up from his paperwork to fix Lister with a withering look. “Hardy-har.”

Lister flashes his most shit-eating grin, balances the lemonade carefully on top of the maintenance trolley, and then pushes it away down the corridor. Under Rimmer’s direction, they head to Room 1903, only interrupted a handful of times—two officers that Rimmer has to spend half an hour saluting, one skutter to reprimand for not ducking its head deferentially as he passed—and find there, sure enough, a ceiling alarm that alternates between a high-pitched intermittent beep and Holly’s voice declaring that _all visitors to the upper decks with red lanyards must be accompanied at all times by a senior officer_.

“Dibs not going up the ladder,” Rimmer says instantly.

“Smeg’s sake, Rimmer.”

With evident delight, Rimmer makes an exaggerated scene of clicking his ball-point pen, ready for action. “Sorry, Lister, but you’ve just got to learn to be a tad quicker off the ball,” he says, and heads up the next sheet on the clipboard in his tiny, immaculate scribble. “Truth be told, you need sharp reflexes for this job—a keen mind, a razor wit… Some have it, and I’m afraid that some just—”

Lister smacks the bottom of the clipboard, jogging Rimmer’s pen wildly across the page in a big inky smudge, and before Rimmer can start ranting and raving and getting out his report book, Lister unfolds the ladder and starts climbing up to the alarm.

_All visitors to the upper decks with red lanyards must be accompanied at all times by a senior officer_ , Holly says. 

“That’s it,” Rimmer says. “That’s _it,_ I’ve had it. I didn’t want it to come to this, but you’ve driven me to it—I’m putting you on report. Again!”

“Anything but that, Rimmer, please.” Lister doesn’t even look at him, focused instead on prying the casing off the alarm.

As he writes, Rimmer recites, “Defacing a senior technician’s paperwork—paperwork which is intrinsic to the safe running of the ship. Recommend two months spent in solitary.”

“Aw, do you promise?”

The alarm rings in a tone almost as shrill as Rimmer’s voice—almost—right in Lister’s ear and echoes in his head. He yanks out a fistful of wires, only to find that they weren’t hooked up to anything anyway, and he tosses them down to an unsuspecting Rimmer at the bottom of the ladder, sending him scrabbling.

“Chuck us a torch,” Lister calls down, raising his voice over the alarm.

Rimmer passes one up. “By the way, Lister, when we clock out, you need to help me with the skutters. I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but every time I give an order they just ignore me.”

Lister throws a sceptical glance back over his shoulder. “When you give an order, everyone just ignores you.”

Rimmer ignores this. “The first few times it happened, I thought it might perhaps be a coincidence or some faulty electrics, but I don’t believe twelve times running can be coincidental anymore. I need you to intervene.”

“Can’t. I’ve gotta go at bang-on five.”

“Why? Is there a toenail-chewing championship I should know about? Wait, don’t answer that.”

Lister rolls his eyes. “I’m meeting Burgess at the cinema on 742. I want to be on time for once.”

“Burgess?” Rimmer echoes. “Burgess? As in, Alice Burgess? Alice Burgess in hydraulics maintenance? Second Technician Burgess?”

Lister looks at him. “ _You’re_ Second Technician.”

Rimmer sniffs. “Yes, but I have aspirations. All she has is halitosis.”

_All visitors to the upper decks with red lanyards must be accompanied at all times by a senior ice-cream inspector_ , Holly says. 

“Not to mention,” Rimmer carries on, in that masturbatory way he gets when he doesn’t really care if anyone’s listening to him, “if you go off to crawl inside Burgess’ enormous, putrefying mouth, I’ll have to do the rest of this floor on my own.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Rimmer, really.”

“There are two more dispensers we still need to take a look at! What if one of them falls on me? What if I have to reach inside to get at a retracted nozzle and my arm gets stuck? What if there’s another bout of extreme projectile stroganoff?”

Above them, the alarm settles back into a deafening, high-pitched scream.

“Look, we can just finish it tomorrow!” Lister says, exasperated. 

“And be behind schedule all day?” Rimmer barks a laugh. “I don’t think so. Think of the knock-on effect! Behind schedule for the afternoon shift, then behind schedule for next week, next month, next year—and before you know it, Bob’s your uncle, we’re late for the rest of our lives.”

Shaking his head, Lister mutters, “If I’m with you for the rest of my life, I’ll throw myself into the engine.”

Deep in the heart of the alarm, there is an exposed wire, copper fraying out from its casing. It’ll need splicing—perfect. Just when Lister thought this one would be easy.

“Lister, you can’t sack off early. You just can’t. She’s not worth it!” Rimmer insists. “She’s mouthy, irritating, stuck-up—she thinks she’s the centre of the smegging universe! I mean, talk about an insufferable waste of oxygen, the woman never, ever, ever shuts up. Ever!”

Unbelievable. Lister just looks at him, and without thinking, he says it. “I’ve shagged worse.”

Rimmer’s mouth snaps shut, teeth clicking, and with that, Lister turns back to the alarm again. Even as he clicks the torch back on to peer into the tangle of wires, he’s inwardly kicking himself—they had a good system, just smoothing over the whole incident, pretending it had never happened, and now he’s gone and cocked it all up.

_All visitors to the upper decks with red lanyards must be accompanied at all times by a senior aardvark_ , Holly says. 

There is a heavy silence, and when Rimmer finally answers, his voice doesn’t quite sound right. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, man. Forget it.” Lister glances back over his shoulder, but carefully doesn’t look at Rimmer. “Switch it off at the breaker?”

“No, Lister, what do you mean?”

“Rimmer, you’re obstructing my duties. Maintenance operations crucial to on-ship safety.”

Muttering something foul under his breath, Rimmer stalks off to the corner of the supply room. He’s gone for a long moment, long enough for Lister to wonder if he can really quickly top himself before Rimmer gets back, just so he doesn’t have to have this conversation. Above Lister’s head, Holly’s voice cuts out with a mournful noise, and the alarm falls silent.

Lister pulls his wire strippers from the waistband of his trousers and sets about cutting the casing back. He is trying not to pay attention to the sound of Rimmer’s returning footsteps, but smeg it, he is, and he knows when Rimmer is hesitating at the foot of the ladder.

“Tell me what you mean,” Rimmer says, at last.

“Look, forget it. Pass me the duct tape.”

“Not until you answer me.”

Lister sighs and braces his forehead against his forearm. “Well, you didn’t exactly go out of your way to show me a good time, did you?”

“Poppycock,” Rimmer splutters. “I was very attentive.”

Incredulous, Lister turns back to look at him. “Rimmer, you didn’t even get round to taking off me trousers.”

Rimmer folds his arms defensively across his chest. “God, there’s no pleasing some people. So what would you have wanted for our little tryst?”

“To get me smegging trousers off!”

“Fine! Fine. I’m sorry I’m not _perfect_.”

“I think that’s the bare minimum, actually. Can I have the tape now?”

Rimmer hands it over. His fingers, when they bump Lister’s on the plastic, are cold. “God, do you always do this? Always hold people hostage until they kowtow to your sexual demands? No wonder Kochanski lost interest.”

With maybe slightly more force than really required, Lister tears off a strip of tape with his teeth. He crudely fixes the dodgy wiring to the side of the casing so that it won’t hang out the side, and then slams the casing closed. “Think fast,” Lister says—and Rimmer doesn’t—as he tosses the roll of tape pack down to him. Rimmer fails to catch it. Lister climbs down the ladder, and then just for good measure, kicks the tape across the floor out of Rimmer’s reach. “It’s dead-on five. I’m going.”

Hastily straightening up from scrambling after the tape, Rimmer gapes at him. “But you’ve not finished fixing the alarm! It’s still exposed—it’s still dangerous!”

Lister packs up his kit, returning tools to the maintenance trolley and retrieving his pack of fags from they’re stashed out of Rimmer’s sight. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Someone could get electrocuted by then!”

Lister shrugs. “You finish it, then.”

Rimmer’s face changes. “It can wait.”

Good old reliable Rimmer. Nothing like the threat of actually having to do his job to get him to back down

Lister grabs his jacket, slings it over his shoulder, and grabs the maintenance trolley to start wheeling it back to its storage compartment. He only gets as far as the supply room door before Rimmer shouts, “Wait!” Then, suddenly, there is Rimmer, getting in the way, and he’s doing something odd with his shoulders that Lister reckons might be Rimmer trying to square up to him—that is, if he’d ever been in a real fight in his life. “Alright,” he says firmly. “Do-over.”

“You what?”

“Let’s have a do-over,” Rimmer says, and he extends a hand formally like it’s a business partnership. “Try again. I’ll make sure I get your sodding trousers off and everything.”

It’s so ridiculous that all Lister can do is laugh right in his face. “No way.”

Rimmer flinches. “Why not?”

“Where do I start?” Lister says, reeling back a step. “Let’s see. Because you’re a snivelling, self-centred, smeg-faced, angry little weasel, and if I was ever gonna shag you, it should’ve been because I liked you, not because you’re the human equivalent of a blister with a stash of naan bread to trade in for sexual favours.”

“You wanted to _like_ me first?” Rimmer says incredulously. “That was never going to happen! Grow up, Lister.”

There’s no point arguing. Even by getting this far in, Lister’s already lost. He slaps a hand to the door panel, stepping back to let it slide open.

“Right,” Rimmer declares. “Off you go, then—enjoy Halitosis Jane and the extended narration of what she had for lunch. Carry on making your way through every other Second Technician on the ship, see if you get a royal flush.”

Lister knows jealous when he sees it, and in Rimmer it’s a neon light. The tight, shrill pitch of his voice, the shoulder rising to his ears, the flared nostrils—he gets it when he talks about his brothers, when he talks about the engineering exam, and he gets it now, talking about Lister shagging other people. His voice rises to a squawk, high enough that Lister winces, and when he puts his weight behind the maintenance trolley to push it out into the corridor, that voice follows him: “And give back my naan bread!”

***

Outside the door of his sleeping quarters, Lister hesitates, swaying. 

Lister’s date with Second Technician Burgess was good. They went to see _Abyss Fifty-Three_ , which wasn’t as scary as Lister had hoped, but Alice seemed to have enjoyed it. She wore nice perfume that made Lister’s nose itch, and she didn’t think he was disgusting, and she seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say, so she was more or less perfect—but Lister doesn’t have anything to say. About anything. He can only go so far on, _so how was your day?_ and, _good film, yeah?_ and she just kept looking at him expectantly, her chin propped in her hands, and Lister didn’t really know what she wanted.

It’s weird, Lister thinks, as he stumbles back along the corridor to his own quarters. He’s good with girls. He can be charming, mostly, and he can be self-deprecating and make them laugh when they think he doesn’t mean it, and then later when they get wound up that actually he really is a slob and an unambitious oaf, he can always turn around and say, _well, I did warn you._ He doesn’t really understand what went wrong tonight, except that it was just… crap. It’s hard to put a finger on the root of the problem, but Lister’s most vivid memory of the evening is the way that both him and Alice were sneaking glances at the clock, both trying to gauge how long they had to stick around out of politeness before they could go home.

Nine o’clock, it turns out. That’s when Alice started putting on her jacket and starting her whole, _this has been fun, but I’ve gotta_ — _erm_ — _I need to_ —and Lister was cobbling similar excuses— _my bunk-mate’s got a pet rock I need to polish,_ or whatever, and then a few hours in the ship’s bar to numb the sting of failure.

No, that’s not true. He wasn’t fussed that Alice hadn’t liked him. It was that he couldn’t face going back to Rimmer’s smug, idiot face.

Even now, he hovers by the door, digging his thumb into the corner of his eye where the seventh lager is getting him tired, and takes a long moment to psych himself up. Likelihood is, Rimmer’s asleep anyway, out like a light with one of his stupid Learn Esperanto discs running, whistling as he snores.

Lister presses a clumsy hand against the door panel until it whooshes softly open, and he steps into a darkness only faintly illuminated at the edges by the emergency exit stripe. He tries to make his way across the room without disturbing anything, but he only makes it a few steps before Rimmer says, “You’re back late.”

Smeg.

Even though Lister knows that Rimmer can’t see him, he still twirls his hand in an obnoxious impression of Rimmer’s idiot salute and slaps himself in the forehead. “Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags smegging full, sir.”

“Lights,” Rimmer says, and for a moment, Lister squints and reels in the bright glare. Then his eyes adjust, and there is Rimmer, looking dishevelled and tired in his white undershirt and boxers, his hair a touch tidier than a tornado, but not by much. “Well?”

Lister gropes for the table, feeling tipsier and unsteadier than he did when he was lurking in the corridor, and drops heavily into a seat. The room spins for a moment before settling. “Well what?”

“I know you want to brag. Off you go, then. How was it?”

Letting out a long, slow breath, Lister runs a hand down over his face, elbows propped on the table. “Yeah, it was good. She was nice. Pretty.” He glances over at Rimmer, and out of nowhere, he decides to stretch it a bit. “She liked me, you know.”

Rimmer’s eyebrows lift. “Wonders never cease.”

And that’s it. No snide comment, no foul jokes, nothing. Rimmer just looks at him, waiting, and Lister wonders how far he could push it—tell Rimmer he got off with her, that he’s going out with her again, that she said he was an amazing, astounding, life-changing lover and begged him for his babies. It doesn’t really seem worth it if Rimmer’s not even interested, and so without meaning to, Lister tells the truth.

“It was fine, but—God, she was boring.”

Rimmer snorts derisively. “I have to admit, I didn’t think intellectual prowess was something particularly high on your list of priorities for sexual conquests.”

“Clearly not, or I wouldn’t have done it with you.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Lister rocks back in his chair, twists to face Rimmer fully. “I mean, how many times have you failed that astro-nav exam?”

“I’m warning you, Lister.”

“And I’m pretty sure it’s the same questions every time as well!”

“Not true,” Rimmer says firmly, and for a second it seems he’s going to argue out of principle, but then his voice drops, meek. “I tried cheating and it didn’t work.”

Lister gives an ugly laugh. “See? How can you get cheating wrong? You’re an out-and-out moron, Rimmer.”

“This is coming from the man who, when asked to retrieve my shoe-horn, replied, and I quote, _I don’t know much about classical music._ ”

“Still don’t,” Lister says, who doesn’t really see how it’s relevant. He’s relaxing now, though—he understands this. This makes sense to him in a way that dinner and a film with Alice Burgess didn’t. He knows what to say to wind Rimmer up, knows how to poke fun where it doesn’t hurt, knows how to get him to lighten up when he’s got that stick right up his arse. Alright, yeah, they’ve had sex that one time, but that doesn’t mean much, and Lister’s only even thinking about it because he’s tipsy and a little fired-up since he thought he might get some action tonight, and also because Rimmer’s inelegantly sprawled on the lower bunk in his stupid white underwear and Lister knows what’s under that underwear, and okay, he’s thinking about it again.

“Are you alright, Lister?” Rimmer asks. “You’ve gone as blank as my last astro-navigation exam. You’re not going to vomit in the bin again, are you? Because I’m not cleaning up after you again, especially not when—”

“Shut up, Rimmer,” Lister says, and he gets up and crosses to the bunks. Rimmer watches him, and his expression only changes when Lister toes off his boots and it becomes clear that he’s not climbing up into his own bed.

“What—”

“Do-over,” Lister says, and he ducks into Rimmer’s bunk, knees dipping the edge of the mattress. “Or are you backing out on me?”

Rimmer has gone very still. His eyes move over Lister’s face with a look that treads close to panic. “I—I—” His voice comes out gabbled. “I haven’t created a plan of attack yet.”

That sounds like a go-ahead. Lister swings one leg over Rimmer’s, his knee between Rimmer’s thighs. Rimmer doesn’t stop him, doesn’t move, frozen into a statue: _Tableau of Coward._

“Stuff that,” Lister says. “Come on, Rimmer. Try just being spontaneous for once.”

Rimmer swallows. “Can I have just a moment to rehearse my spontaneity?”

“No,” Lister says, and kisses him.

Whatever uncertainty was rioting in Rimmer’s neurotic little head must vanish, because his hands curl into the front of Lister’s jacket and don’t let go. Lister is conscious of his bulk in his clothes and his leathers, especially against Rimmer in his underwear, but he’d be a liar if he said it didn’t light the low flicker of a fire in his gut. He cups Rimmer’s jaw in one hand, his thumb on his chin to drag his mouth open, and Rimmer makes a low sound in the back of his throat.

Truth be told, Rimmer’s not even as crap as he was last time. There’s still a lot of tongue, but Rimmer moves slowly—maybe it’s because he’s half-asleep and still catching up—and so there is something weirdly sensual about the wet heat of his mouth. Lister presses closer, licks into Rimmer’s mouth and is pleased by the hiccup of noise Rimmer makes, the way Rimmer releases fistfuls of Lister’s jacket and flattens his palms over his waist. There is an awkward moment where their noses bump, and Lister’s locs fall over his shoulder onto Rimmer’s face, and Rimmer tries to do something with his teeth which Lister reckons is maybe supposed to be sexy but sort of misses the mark, but it’s—it’s alright. The warm span of Rimmer’s fingers lifts goosebumps on Lister’s skin beneath his least-crappy T-shirt, and it’s good.

Rimmer pulls back far enough to breathe, his forehead bumping Lister’s as he drops his head to concentrate on fumbling with the front of Lister’s trousers. “See, don’t worry,” he says. “I’m taking them off.”

“Hey, steady on,” Lister says, taking his hand to slow him down.

“I am steady,” Rimmer says, and isn’t. His fingers jitter against the zip and buckle.

Lister tilts his face up, catches his mouth again with his own, kisses him long and slow. “You got something against foreplay or what, man?” he says into the corner of his mouth, hands pressing Rimmer back into the mattress. Bonus of the cheap, thin boxers: there’s no hiding Rimmer’s interest.

Rimmer huffs. “So let me get this straight,” he starts.

“Smeg, Rimmer, don’t—”

“Last time, I didn’t get your trousers off quick enough and it was cause for complaint. And _this_ time, lo and behold, I try—”

Lister finds a way to shut him up. He slides his first two fingers into Rimmer’s mouth, presses down on his tongue, and Rimmer’s eyes go wide. He makes a strangled, helpless little noise, but it’s not a protest, and if it’s a complaint it’s a weak one, and for the first time in Arnold Rimmer’s whole life, he’s quiet and cooperative. If Captain Hollister could see him now…

Lister leans in to press an open-mouthed, lazy kiss against the hinge of his jaw, and he can feel Rimmer’s heart hammering in his throat. “Slow down,” Lister says into his skin, and pulls his fingers from Rimmer’s mouth. 

Under his lips, Lister can feel when Rimmer swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing, and when he manages to speak, Rimmer’s voice is high and thin. “I don’t think I—erm—”

“You’re alright,” Lister says, low and soothing. It's probably the seventh lager speaking, but he feels confident, easy, dead sexy, like he could seduce anyone, reduce Rimmer to a quivering wreck, all of it. “Relax.” He wriggles out of his jacket, shrugs it off to land on the floor somewhere, and it has barely touched the ground when Rimmer’s hands are tugging at Lister’s shirt, rucking it up to his ribs. He winds up half-tangled in his sleeves, flapping to get free, and he half expects Rimmer to take the piss, but when he looks back, Rimmer’s face is all at once flushed red and terrified. He touches Lister’s chest with faltering fingertips, and it’s a weird ego boost—the realisation that Rimmer actually _wants_ him.

From there, it’s a blind tangle of hands peeling clothes off, Lister’s mouth on Rimmer’s bare collarbone, Rimmer’s fingers tight enough to bruise on Lister’s thighs, the subtle spread of Rimmer’s thighs to let Lister better settle between into the V, his weight pressing the thick line of Rimmer’s dick against Lister’s hip. God, it feels good, and Lister doesn’t even mind that he’s dry-humping his bunk-mate like he’s fourteen years old, or that his bunk-mate is widely agreed to be the worst person in human history, because he's busy planting a hand solidly on the mattress beside Rimmer’s shoulder so that he can push back harder against him. Rimmer’s head tips back, breath hitching, and his hips rock against the friction.

“Lister,” Rimmer says, rough and unsteady. “Lister—Lister, wait.”

Lister’s gut wrenches sickeningly as he pulls back. Trust Rimmer to let him get this far before he changes his mind. He sits back on his heels, digging the heels of his hands into his thighs as he bites back his frustration—but then Rimmer surges back up to meet him, working at his trousers again, and this time Lister’s not stopping him.

It’s not sexy, Lister struggling out of his clothes, especially not when he gets down to his socks and is near buffeted by the smeg-awful waft of old cheese, but Rimmer doesn’t slow down. He runs his mouth off at the same time—because when does he not—with _disgusting, noxious, absolutely primitive, you’re like an ape, Darwin would have a field day,_ but he doesn’t slow down, and he doesn’t stop. 

Then Rimmer lets go, reaches over for Lister’s now-discarded trousers, balls them up and launches them across the room, hard enough that they hit the lockers on the far wall with a deafening clang.

“And stay there!” Rimmer declares, emphatic and breathless, with a dramatic sweeping gesture. “Satisfied?”

“Smegging hell,” Lister says, a laugh startled out of him against all odds, and then Rimmer gets a hand round the back of Lister’s head and pulls him back down into another kiss. There is an ungainly click of teeth meeting, but Rimmer’s mouth is slick and hot, open and eager. Desire pools in Lister’s belly and he wants Rimmer’s big spindly hands on him properly. He wants to rub against him so badly it’s stupid, and God, he’s exactly as brainless for sex as Rimmer always accuses him of being, but it’s hard to care much at the minute. Hard to think much of anything, to tell the truth, when Rimmer’s tongue is in his mouth, and Lister has no idea if Rimmer’s getting better at snogging or if Lister’s just getting desensitised, but right now he likes him, really likes him.

Rimmer captures Lister’s lower lip, and his hand flirts nervously by Lister’s thigh, fingers barely brushing over his skin, before he takes a deep breath and fits his hand to Lister’s dick. Jesus, it’s good, Rimmer’s hand huge and warm and solid, fingers curling loosely so that the heat sparks higher and hotter as he jacks Lister closer to the edge.

Lister holds onto him, one hand on Rimmer’s waist, the other sliding into a fistful of his stupid curls, just clinging on for dear life—he never yet got the hang of how to fuck and fondle at the same time—and he breathes ragged as his hips shift to follow Rimmer’s hand. His fingers tighten enough to pull Rimmer’s head back, expose his throat, and Rimmer makes a breathless little whine that seems totally involuntary and a little embarrassing from the way that his ears redden. Rimmer’s dick jumps, leaving a wet stripe across his own stomach, and Lister wants to taste it. He wants to see what Rimmer’s made of.

Rimmer’s hand tightens, and Lister’s eyes flutter closed with a low, wordless sound. “Yeah,” he says, without meaning to, “That’s good—yeah, Krissie, love it like that.” His mouth is going at light-speed while his brain’s at a red light, and then he catches up with himself, and he just says, “Fuck.”

Even worse, it takes Rimmer a split-second to twig it. Then there is a weird syncopated moment where Rimmer’s shoulders go loose but his hand is still wanking Lister off, and he goes quiet but he’s still breathing too loud, each exhale wavering on the edge of being some sexy sound, and then Rimmer stops altogether.

Lister opens his eyes. 

Alright, that one is his fault.

With his face tilted up to the top of the bunk, it’s hard to gauge Rimmer’s reaction. Lister doesn’t want to say sorry til he knows how deeply he’s cocked this up, but nothing is happening and he feels like he’s got to be the one who starts something off. He clears his throat, and the noise is far, far too loud.

At last, Lister just says, “Whoops.”

He lets go sheepishly of Rimmer’s hair, retracts his hand into his own space.

Rimmer takes a deep breath, and then he sits back, lowering his chin like he’s coming back to Earth in a tin can and didn’t expect to stick the landing. “Well,” he says, in a tight voice. “That’s that, isn’t it?”

“Sorry, man,” Lister tries. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, neither was I.” Rimmer doesn’t look at him. “Right. Out you get.”

Lister doesn’t move. “Wait—I’m sorry.”

“Get out of my bunk, Lister.”

“But…” Lister looks helplessly between Rimmer’s face and his own crotch, where he’s still mostly hard. “I’m not finished.”

Rimmer doesn’t say anything to that, just turns his face to the wall, and leaves Lister sitting there like a useless lump between his thighs.

“Smeg,” Lister mutters, and he climbs out of Rimmer’s bunk. Moving anywhere at all is a ginger, careful affair with the wood he’s sporting—trying to clamber up into his own bed is a bloody nightmare. 

Finally, he flops down onto his mattress, one leg still hanging over the edge, and he stares up at the ceiling, feeling like the world’s biggest goit. If there is a God, he obviously hates Lister, because otherwise there’s no logic in how Lister can come out of any interaction being a worse human being than Arnold Rimmer.

Silence settles in their sleeping quarters, but it just prickles at Lister’s skin and makes him feel more alert and uncomfortable. He knows the annoying whistle of Rimmer’s snore, and the lack of it means that Rimmer’s just lying awake down there in silence too. Lister wonders if he should say something, but aside from _sorry,_ or _I’m drunk_ , or _hey, it should’ve been obvious I didn’t properly fancy you all along so what do you give such a toss about this for?_ he can’t think of what he would say, and he’s pretty sure all of those options would make things worse.

Lister flips over, punches his pillow into the right shape, and tries to stop thinking.

***

In the days that follow, Rimmer becomes an exponentially bigger smeghead, and it’s impossible to tolerate him. Easier by far, instead, to put in a leave of absence request off-ship to Titan.

***


	2. Dead

**II**

One thing leads to another, and then, eighty-thousand millisieverts of gamma radiation later, everyone is dead.

It’s hardly surprising, to tell the truth. You leave Rimmer alone for two minutes and he cocks something up. Admittedly, Lister never thought he’d cock up this badly, but then again he did have to do all the menial tasks that he usually fobbed off on Lister; having to scrub a floor might have irreversibly addled his brain.

Either way, this is the status quo now: nothing to do and no-one for company, at the end of human existence. Lister is the last vestige of humanity in the infinite emptiness of deep space, and he is currently playing Flip Cup against a skutter.

“You ready this time?” Lister checks. “I don’t wanna embarrass you again.”

The excitable little robot revs up and down on the table, getting amped up, and it nods its head.

“Three… two… one… go!”

If there’s one thing Lister’s good at, it’s drinking games. He necks the first pint, balances the cup, flips it carefully—”Yes, boys, he’s pulling into the lead!”—and moves onto the next as the skutter emits a series of whirring squeaks that sound like Lister might be getting cursed out, and then that’s when Rimmer comes in.

“What on Io are you doing, Lister?”

“Bit busy at the minute,” Lister says after he finishes the next pint, lager slopping out of the corner of his mouth and down his shirt, and he bends to carefully flip the cup. He’s off his game now, though, and the cup spins, falls over, while in the meantime the skutter lands his cup perfectly with an ecstatic squeal.

Rimmer sniffs. “Oh, is it Juvenile Idiocy O’Clock? My mistake.”

For a second, Lister thinks that means that Rimmer is going to clear off the way he came and occupy himself somewhere, but no such luck. He crosses his arms and watches the game disapprovingly, and then when it’s clear that no-one is paying enough attention to his disapproval, he starts loudly tutting and shaking his head.

Lister and the skutter carry on ignoring him. They’re head-to-head, the skutter’s mechanical precision up against Lister’s decades of drunken practice, and it’s anybody’s game.

“Well, well, well,” Rimmer says. “Well, well. Is this what it’s come to? You know, I didn’t think that after I died, idiotic party games would be something I’d still have to worry about, but I suppose death is just full of wonderful little surprises.”

Historically, Lister has spent a lot of time since he joined wishing that he could kill Rimmer, but somehow Rimmer is _worse_ since he’s dead. The chip on his shoulder could now metaphorically leave his arm near severed, and it’s just another smegging thing to complain about. There is no problem or worry of Lister’s that can’t be trumped by it. God, Lister thinks, you get vaporised by a radiation leak one time, and you never shut up about it.

He flips his last cup, misses, tries again—and it lands perfectly, beautifully, an Olympic-standard cup-flip. Lister raises both arms with a primal yell of victory, and Rimmer flinches back away from Lister’s bared armpits.

“He’s unstoppable, unkillable, undefeatable,” Lister chants. “Dave Lister does it again, he just can’t be stopped!”

The skutter gives a series of quick, pissed-off beeps, and waves its head threateningly at him.

“Are you quite finished?” Rimmer says peevishly.

Lister lowers his arms and looks over, already exasperated before the conversation has even started. “What do you want, Rimmer?”

With a deep breath, Rimmer draws himself up to his full height in an attempt to be authoritative, but it makes no difference. He’s still a smeghead. “You’ve been neglecting your duties,” he declares. “Nine days ago, the women’s lavatory on Level 203 ran out of hand-soap in one of the dispensers—it’s your job to make sure they remain fully stocked!”

Lister stares at him. “Who cares? No-one’s using them anyway!”

“Not at the moment, no. But I’m willing to bet that if a woman was to suddenly show up on-board, you would wish those dispensers were full.”

“No, I’d just say, hang on, use a different loo, that one’s out of soap.”

“And you would look like the incompetent fool who wasn’t expecting company.”

“I’m _not_ expecting company!” Lister exclaims. “We’re in the middle of deep space, millions of miles from anywhere or anyone, and the human race is extinct. I don’t think the ladies’ hand-soap is our biggest, top, number one priority at the minute.”

“But the little things are important, too,” Rimmer insists. “You know what they say— _if it’s a pouch, it’s a patch, it’s a submarine hatch_.”

“Or a drive-plate,” Lister says pointedly, and Rimmer’s mouth snaps shut. “Anyway, no-one says that.”

“I say that.”

“Yeah, no-one.”

Rimmer’s expression sours. “Whether you like it or not, Lister, we have to stay on top of things like this! If we start letting the ship slide into disrepair, we’re finished.”

“I hardly think that running out of soap in one dispenser, in a loo no-one even uses, qualifies for _disrepair_ , Rimmer. Besides—if no-one’s using it, how did we run out nine days ago anyway?”

There is a beat, and then, at the same moment, both of them say, “The Cat.”

“It does smell nicer than the one in the men’s,” Rimmer admits.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Aloe and something.”

Lister considers this, intrigued. “Which loo?”

This is how time goes, now. Inane, stupid games to pass the time; bickering with Rimmer; repeat. Name That Tune, played only through armpit farts; Rimmer picking at bin-liners being put back on the bins the wrong way around ( _“the plastic tab is on the front for a reason! It fits perfectly into the slot designed for it, it’s not difficult”)_ ; Cutlery Jousting, where Lister sellotapes forks to skutters’ heads and sets them off against each other; Rimmer getting snippy about Lister’s dirty dishes scattered across every surface in the drive room (“ _you’ll cause an accident, I don’t want to be double-killed because you short-circuit the controls by spilling vindaloo everywhere!”_ ); Sock Basketball, which drives Rimmer mental; Rimmer, going mental about Sock Basketball.

Every now and then, there is a break in the monotony of the every day. Holly finds something floating in space to investigate, or something important breaks down in a life-threatening way, or something tries to come aboard and kill them all. This is, Lister guesses, the new normal. Keeps him on his toes, at the least.

***

“Morning, Dave.”

Lister, who is trying to create a modern masterpiece out of dry Weetabix, looks up to see Holly’s face projected onto the mirror. “Hiya, Hol. What’s up?”

Holly frowns, distracted by the sight of the crumbly Weetabix tower. “What’s that, then?”

“It’s art,” Lister says, dusting crumbs from his hands. “See, if the human race is gone, we need something left behind to remember us by. So this is gonna be a masterpiece for the ages.”

“Is that not just a big cock and balls made out of Weetabix?”

Lister pauses, looking back and re-evaluating his work. “Well, yeah. Doesn’t mean it isn’t art, though.”

“In that case, I’ve got some old arithmetic books I ought to turn in to the Tate Modern.”

“Alright, alright. What’s going on, anyway? Everything okay?”

Holly considers this. “Yes and no. There’s something going on in the maintenance decks. Electricals are going funny out of nowhere, and I’m getting cut out of some parts of the ship. But on the bright side, I’ve discovered that there’s one screen on B-deck where I can materialise and it looks like I’ve got a really great hairdo—long and luscious. So that’s something.”

Lister sits back in his chair. “Do you know what’s causing it?”

“Yeah. There’s a mop leaning on the screen.”

“I meant the electrics, Holly.”

“No idea, but between you and me, I reckon the fact it’s been three million years since my last meter reading might have something to do with it.”

“Alright, I’ll go check it out. Is Rimmer or the Cat about?”

“No idea where the Cat is. I’m nervous about trying to find him on the ship’s scanners to tell you the truth. I can’t get out of my head what I accidentally found him doing last time. Rimmer’s on his way to the service elevator now.”

“Okay.” Lister scrapes his chair back from the table, disregarding the collapse of the Leaning Knob of Pisa, and wipes his hands on his shirt. “Tell him to wait for me by the lift, will you?”

It’s a ten-minute walk to the service elevator, and Lister arrives to find Rimmer already waiting, hands clasped in the small of his back. He glances over as Lister approaches.

“Holly filled you in already?” Rimmer asks, then doesn’t even leave Lister time to answer before he starts shaking his head. “He’s wrong. I can tell.”

“You what?”

“Something’s wrong, something big. I have a good sixth sense when it comes to these things.”

Lister’s eyebrows lift. “Yeah, I remember when you were mega alert about that Cadmium II leak.”

Rimmer ignores this comment, and he presses the button for the lift. “I worked in sanitation and maintenance for fifteen years, Lister. I’ll have you know I did stints in every sector. Plumbing, electrics, sweeping, turning it off and on again, light-switch polishing—you name it. I think I know the ship pretty well by this point.”

“Oh, right.” Lister folds his arms across his chest, nodding. “Yeah, course.” He stands there a while longer before he can resist it no longer, and then he turns to Rimmer. “You know this lift’s out of order, then.”

“Of course I know—what?”

Lister snorts a laugh, and he jerks his head down the corridor. “Has been since before the crew got wiped out. Come on. Next one down is fine.”

Rimmer trails behind him, quiet for once, and when they reach the service elevator on the next corridor, the lift doors open immediately. Lister follows Rimmer in and punches the button for the maintenance deck. The closing doors seal out the general noise of the ship, leaving them in an echoing space in which even the sound of Lister’s breathing seems loud.

Lister pushes his hand into the pockets of his trousers. “What do you think we’ll find down there, then?”

Rimmer exhales, blows out his cheeks. “No idea. Rats chewing through the cables. A massive hole in the hull, knowing our luck. All of the above, perhaps.”

“God, what’s got you in such a good mood?”

“Have you forgotten that I’m dead?”

“Oh, hang on—no, you might have mentioned it once or twice.”

The lift hums as it descends, slow and steady. The overhead lights flicker.

Rimmer sits down on the bench at the edge of the lift just as the helpful instructional video starts up. _Welcome to Xpress Lifts’ descent to Floor 76_ , the woman begins, smiling inanely, and Lister tries not to listen. It’s only a short trip down to the maintenance decks, twenty minutes or so in this suffocating mechanical tin can, and then he’s out. He’ll be alright as long as he doesn’t think too much about it.

Instead, he occupies himself by trying to list old crewmates’ birthdays in order—Chen, fourteenth of March. Selby, August something or other. Petersen, November twenty-eighth. He is racking his brain for Todhunter’s birthday when Rimmer starts jiggling his leg. Lister tries to ignore it.

Todhunter—if Lister remembers rightly, there was that time the crew threw a surprise party for Todhunter, and he thinks it might have been in the summer. He definitely remembers giant inflatable flamingos and strings of plastic flowers around people’s necks, but maybe that was just because of—

Rimmer’s leg is jiggling faster and faster. His toe is tapping a frantic beat on the floor.

“Will you stop that?” Lister asks.

Rimmer looks over. “Stop what?”

“Your leg,” Lister says. “You’re making it hard to concentrate.”

“On what?” Rimmer says, eyebrows lifting. He glances around the lift pointedly. “Wall, wall, wall, wall, floor, ominous overhead suicide compartment.”

Lister pinches the bridge of his nose. “Will you just—shut up? Please.”

Rimmer holds his hands up in a patronising display of surrender, and then makes a scene of zipping his lips closed.

As they go further down, the temperature changes, getting warmer as they near the engine decks. The screen which displayed the safety broadcast crackles at the edges with static. The lights flicker again.

Right, old crew birthdays are out—but maybe he can replay the entirety of Knuckle Sandwich 5 in his head, frame by frame, and then he won’t have to think about the fact that he is trapped in a tiny metal box with no exits, suspended several miles above the bottom of the lift shaft.

Rimmer’s right leg starts bouncing. His fingers drum in a quick, aggressive staccato on his other knee.

Lister bursts out, “Rimmer, you’re driving me ballistic.”

“I’m not doing anything!” Rimmer says defensively. “I’m just sitting here in peace and quiet, and you’re the one—”

“Can you not sit still for five minutes? Five stinking, smegging minutes, Rimmer, that’s all I’m asking,” Lister says, and then the lights go out.

The lift gives a sickening lurch that nearly has Lister’s breakfast rematerialising all across the floor as his stomach drops ten feet, and his hands fly out, desperate for purchase against the feeling that he’s going to fall to his death—slaps straight through Rimmer’s head to hit the wall on the other side—and he presses himself tight into the corner.

“What the smeg was that?” Lister gasps.

Rimmer looks rattled, too, his eyes wide, nostrils at maximum volume. “Holly, what’s going on?” he demands, jerking to his feet. “Holly?”

Silence fills the lift. The darkness is only broken by the strip of green emergency lighting around the base of the walls, and also by the faint glow that Rimmer’s hologram emits, like a giant, annoying lamp. Holly doesn’t answer. The lights don’t come back on. 

Slowly, Lister straightens up. “Hol?” He pushes the intercom button, the help button, the emergency alarm button—nothing. “Holly, can you hear us?”

Nothing. When Lister tries the intercom button again, it buzzes and crackles and then cuts out.

“I think that’s a no, then,” Rimmer says.

Lister presses his forehead against the dead panel, closes his eyes, and takes one long, slow, deep breath. Then another. “Fan-smegging-tastic.”

He’s going to be fine. He’s going to be fine. He can feel sweat prickling on the back of his neck, on his upper lip. His hands are clammy and cold. 

“Are you alright?”

Trapped. Trapped in a lift. Trapped in a lift about seven-hundred floors up from the bottom of the lift shaft. Trapped with _Rimmer._ Lister wants to beat his head against the wall, but he doesn’t trust that he might somehow destabilise the whole thing and send them plummeting to their deaths. Where were those cyanide capsules again? Might take one now, just to take the edge off. Just to pre-empt his imminent fiery death.

“Lister?”

“Piss off,” Lister mutters, eyes still closed. His knees are wobbling underneath him, but he can’t sit down because his eyes are shut, and he can’t open his eyes because the walls are closing in and also he’s having trouble breathing.

“You’re having a panic attack, Lister.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Look, unfortunately, I’m something of an expert.” Rimmer’s voice is brisk and officious, but quieter than usual, like he is trying his hardest to be gentle. “You need to sit down. Sit down or fall down.”

In terms of destabilising the balance of the lift, passing out seems worse. Lister cracks his eyes open—oh, smeg, there go the walls, and his vision is blurring into neat little pixels—and he drops clumsily to the ground. He sits with his back pressed against the wall, legs pulled up in front of him, head between his knees, and he tries not to be sick.

“Now, do we have anything we could put on your head?”

“I’m fine.”

“A colander would be ideal, but—”

“I’m fine, Rimmer,” Lister says. “Just… don’t like enclosed spaces.”

Rimmer stares at him. “So you joined the Space Corps?” he says incredulously. His voice changes, dipping into a stupid officer impersonation: “ _Are you a man who loves the open air and wind on your face? Then do we have the perfect career for you—join the Space Corps now, where you can be hermetically sealed into a box for a few million years_.”

Lister could strangle him. “You’re not helping.”

“I never said I was trying to help. Okay, just try to breathe.”

“I am breathing.”

“Just breathe—”

“I _am_ breathing, Rimmer, shut up.”

“Nice and slowly. Apparently counting sheep is supposed to help—visualising them jumping over fences. Personally, it just made me start worrying about the fact that all my livestock was escaping.”

“Can I imagine that they’re using your big head as a springboard?”

“Whatever floats your boat.”

Lister takes deep breaths and slowly calms down. It takes several long, silent moments, but he does come back to himself. He does feel less nauseous, more clear-headed, to be fair—except for the part where he lifts his head and looks up at Rimmer and something stupid happens. His focus gets stuck on Rimmer’s hands on his hips, sleeves rolled neatly to the elbow, his narrow forearms, that stern look on his face, and Lister actually feels _glad_ that Rimmer is there.

So clearly there is still something wrong with him.

“What?” Rimmer demands, after a beat, and Lister realises he has been staring at Rimmer too long. “Sheep all gone already?”

Lister shakes his head. He loops his arms around his knees and resists the urge to press his face into his kneecaps like a kid. “God, I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but…” He steels himself, and asks, “Rimmer, could you just—talk to me?”

Rimmer looks taken aback. “Talk to you?”

“Yeah. Just—as a distraction, you know.”

Rimmer’s mouth opens and closes a few times. “I—I don’t know. What about?”

Lister groans. “Oh, come on, Rimmer. I spend half my smegging life telling you to shut up, and now the one time I actually ask, you’ve got nothing to say? Give me a break.”

“You hate my stories,” Rimmer says sullenly.

“Usually, yeah.”

“You said last time that you’d rather have a tabasco enema than hear another one of my stories.”

“Yeah. But we’re seven-hundred floors up with no way out, and there’s no tabasco on hand.”

Rimmer falters. He swings his arms uselessly for a moment, as though he’s trying to build up the momentum to launch himself into the conversation. “Erm,” he says. “Do you want to talk about… girls?”

Lister looks at him blankly. “What?”

“Girls. Women. The female species.”

“They’re not a species, Rimmer, you twonk. This is why they never like you.”

“Women like me just fine,” Rimmer says acidly. “I once sat for a family portrait, and I’ll have you know that the portraitist—a woman—said that when I kept still, I could be mistaken for handsome.”

Lister winces. “That’s not the compliment you think it is,” he tells Rimmer, but Rimmer pulls that face—wrinkling his nose, squinting—like he doesn’t believe a word Lister says anyway, so there’s no point in pushing the issue. “Anyway, who says I want to talk about girls?”

Rimmer scoffs. “You’ve got a one-track mind. It’s all you ever want to talk about.”

“Not true!” 

Rimmer says, “Absolutely true,” with that self-satisfied little smirk, and he is entirely too smug—so much so that Lister decides to take him down a peg.

Lister pauses, lets Rimmer get comfortable in his own cockiness, and then he tests the waters. He says, “Maybe I wanna talk about boys.”

It works perfectly. Rimmer’s face changes, his smirk dropping, and there is a look of what can only be described as panic that crosses his face. He opens his mouth, and the first sound that comes out of it is squeaky and not really in English. Then Rimmer clears his throat loudly. “That’s not my area of expertise,” he says, at last, which is an understatement.

“You don’t say.”

Rimmer lowers himself to the floor opposite Lister, back against the wall of the lift. His feet, when he stretches his gangly legs out, would bump Lister’s if they were solid. He lets out his breath. “At boarding school, the boys weren’t kind to anyone with unusual inclinations,” he starts, slow and uncertain. “I once got beaten up for enjoying a banana too much. When they told my father what had happened, all he wanted to know was if they’d managed to sort me out! The worst part is the headmaster said _no._ ”

A sizable part of Lister wants to laugh. He doesn’t. “Did they know?”

“Know?” Rimmer echoes. “They didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anything! I was ten—I hadn’t even figured out what everything down there was for, let alone where I wanted to stick it.”

Lister grimaces. “I think I probably knew all along,” he says, after a moment, thoughtful. “Never really questioned it.”

“What, that you liked…” Rimmer trails off meaningfully.

“No—that you did,” Lister says. Rimmer recoils, mouth falling open, and Lister rescues him before he starts spluttering and steaming at the ears. “Relax, will you? I’m joking.”

If Rimmer does relax, it’s so minutely that it’s not visible to the human eye. He gives an eye-roll of such magnitude it should make a dent on the Richter scale, and Lister is ninety-three percent certain he can see colour climbing up past Rimmer’s collar.

Lister leans back, stretching out one leg, and it seems surreal, the fact that he actually does feel calmer now—and all it took was taking the piss out of Rimmer. He decides not to look at that too closely. Instead, he drums a hand on his knee and says, “Go on, then. Boys. Any stories?”

Rimmer shifts his weight. He folds his hands primly in his lap like he’s at a job interview. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Girls, then.”

Rimmer cocks an eyebrow. “McGruder or Rachel?”

Lister laughs. “Smeg, I forgot about Rachel.”

“I wish I could.”

“How’d she get punctured again?”

“Belt buckle.”

“Ah. Bet that was disappointing.”

Rimmer smirks. His projection dimly illuminates the lift in an unsteady white light. “Bit of an anti-climax, yes.”

Lister snorts. “You know that didn’t help your prospects much, either, having a sex doll.”

“Oh, yes, keep the tips coming, Lister,” Rimmer says, sarcasm so heavy it’s a wonder the lift doesn’t drop. “These’ll be really handy in a pinch when I’m seducing dead alien women who come swarming aboard in search of a soul-mate.”

Lister gives a noncommittal shrug. “Hey, stranger things have happened.”

“True. Case in point—a situation has arisen in which I am not the biggest coward in the room.”

“I’ve got claustrophobia, you slimy git.”

“I know,” Rimmer says, smiling inanely. “It makes me feel very brave.”

“Yeah, well. Enjoy it while it lasts.” Lister settles, relaxing. “Alright, then. Tell me about boarding school.”

“What about it?”

“I dunno, anything. I barely even showed up for the register at my school. The thought of living there seems mad to me.”

“Well, I imagine it was much like most schools,” Rimmer says, his gaze lost in the middle distance. “Utterly soul-destroying.”

“No kidding.”

“It was an all boys’ school. Very prestigious, very expensive. My parents would post me a weekly bill of how much everything I did was costing them, to remind me to be grateful. Two-hundred dollar-pounds per lesson. Four-fifty per meal, provided that I didn’t get pudding. A tenner every time I went to the little boys’ room. I tried holding it in for a fortnight to save my father some money and nearly ruptured my colon. Ironically, the surgery almost bankrupted them.”

Lister considers this. “That explains a lot—why you’re so full of shit.”

“Har-har. It wasn’t all bad. I had a lot of opportunities—rugby, orchestra, cricket, the Little Cherubs’ choir for late bloomers…”

In a little mental hiccup, Lister’s brain doesn’t know what to latch onto first to take the piss. “I didn’t know you were in an orchestra.”

“There’s lots you don’t know about me. We weren’t exactly close, before the accident.”

“Yeah, but you never shut up. I thought I’d heard all there was to hear.”

“Not necessarily. There are some things I prefer to keep private.”

“Oh yeah? Like your dark, mysterious past in the school orchestra, that right? Go on, then. What did you play?”

“The triangle.”

Inelegantly, Lister lets out what can only be described as a guffaw. “God, who would have thought you were such a maestro?”

“You laugh, but percussion is the backbone of music, what holds it all together, what elevates it from a toddler abusing a xylophone to the dizzying heights of a crescendo… and for that, the triangle is intrinsic. More crucial, I would argue, than any other instrument. The violin, the piano, the conductor—all of these are replaceable. But without the triangle…” Rimmer shakes his head. “Not that you’d understand, Lister. What would you know about classical music, anyway?”

“I don’t know, I’m pretty good with a shoe-horn.”

Against all odds, the impossible happens—Rimmer laughs.

Even stranger, though, is the warmth unfurling in Lister’s belly, the way he finds himself grinning in echo of the curve of Rimmer’s smile.

Fast-forward to an hour in, and they’re running out of items in the lift to point out for I Spy; two hours, and Lister has officially run out of a filthy jokes. Rimmer’s contributions are not filthy, and decidedly not funny, save for Lister’s improvised input. “Why didn’t the hologram go to the disco?” Rimmer asks, and the answer is apparently _not_ because he has no friends, as Lister so helpfully chips in. The conversation turns to old movies, then to favourite meals— _all I ask_ , Rimmer declares passionately, i _s a tall ship, a star to steer her by, and enough mashed potatoes to fill a wheelbarrow_ —to an argument over whether strict uniform policies actually make a difference—they don’t—to what the Cat’s religion would be like if Rimmer had been the one to smuggle Frankenstein aboard. Bleak, is the conclusion that they come to, and then when things start getting stuffy and dull, Lister finds a fusty old bag of half-eaten peanuts growing mould in his jacket pocket, and he commits himself to the task of throwing peanuts at the H on Rimmer’s head.

At first, Rimmer hadn’t been pleased, spouting a lot of hot air about respect for the dead, but when one peanut seems to be aimed true—Lister sucks in his breath in anticipation—only to sail cleanly through Rimmer’s nose, Rimmer does lean forwards to ask if that went in.

“You gotta keep still,” Lister complains, shaking the bag for the next salted peanut.

“Where? Like this?” Rimmer holds himself still, sitting neatly upright, and he raises his eyebrows.

“Yeah, that’s it.” Lister lines up his throw, one eye closed, and— “Smeg! Nearly. I went just a tiny bit wide of the H.”

“Get it through the top or there’s no point.”

“What d’you think I’m doing? I’m not an idiot.”

“You’ve a lot of talk for a man whose last throw went through my eyebrow.”

“As if you can tell,” Lister mutters, and he throws the next peanut straight through Rimmer’s hairline. “Smeg. It’s your giant forehead that’s the problem.”

“Oh, yes, here it comes. My forehead is too big; the peanuts are too salty; there isn’t the optimum lift temperature and your hands are sweating. I know your game—everything is everyone else’s fault, there’s no accountability whatsoever, you just—”

Lister throws the next peanut and lets out a primal yell when it zips neatly through the top two spokes of the H.

“Yes, Lister!” Rimmer urges, instantly changing sides when it suits him, like usual, and he shakes a fist encouragingly. “One more—two in a row, you can do it.”

“Patience, patience…” Lister rummages for the biggest peanut in the bag, blows on his two palms like he’s preparing for a boxing match, wriggles to adjust his position on the floor, and lines himself up.

“You can do it, Lister. Don’t cock this up for us.”

“Alright, stop moving. Steady…” Lister holds his breath, and he throws. Something goes totally wrong, though. His aim falls wildly short, and instead of soaring through the middle of Rimmer’s face, the peanut goes through his chest, and then there is a sharp, metallic clang, and Rimmer vanishes.

“Smeg—Rimmer!” Lister exclaims, scrambling down onto his hands and knees as Rimmer’s light-bee clatters to the floor and rolls away under one of the benches. He ducks to peer into the dark, but without the thin light that Rimmer emits, the lift is almost totally black, the emergency strip lighting no help. He shoves his arm under the bench, flails around blindly, until at last his fingers bump against the warm metal of the light-bee, caught in a cobweb by the bench’s back leg.

Lister pulls it back to him and kneels to check it. He fiddles with the casing to make sure that the projector is aligned correctly, taps the lamp at the end twice, and then he lets go. It whirrs frantically for a moment to suspend itself in mid-air, and then Rimmer flickers back into the lift. He is still sat on the floor, legs stretched out before him, with the minor adjustment that now Lister is crouching between his knees. They don’t line up quite right—technically, one of Lister’s knees is going through Rimmer’s thigh—but the facts are that Lister is close enough to see clearly the raised scar on Rimmer’s jaw, the kink in his hair where he’s tried to get Holly to flatten his ridiculous curls, the ring of a softer brown around his irises. The surface of him shimmers faintly, the projector still warming up.

Rimmer’s eyes fall to Lister’s mouth and then away. He says drily, “Thanks for that.”

“Sorry, man.” Lister backs up to give him some space. “To be fair, though, I reckon I should’ve got extra points for that.”

“In your dreams, Lister.”

Lister shimmies back to lean against the wall, and digs once more in the bag of peanuts. “Bet you anything I can get one through your eye.”

***

In the end, it takes just under six hours for the lights to come back on. Lister almost pisses in the water cooler because he’s getting that desperate, while Rimmer takes the opportunity to gloat that there are some benefits to being dead after all, right up until Lister wonders out loud how long his projector will last on a portable battery. Then there is an almighty crunch that makes Lister panic all over again, the lights buzz slowly into life, and with a deafening grinding sound which is slightly gentler than Rimmer’s snoring, but not by much, the lift starts moving.

By the time they get out, the Cat is waiting at the bottom, looking unimpressed. “The hell did you do?” he demands, as soon as the doors opened. “That dopey computer had to disturb me from my beauty sleep! Now how am I supposed to keep up the pace of dazzling all night long?”

“Aw, you’ll manage,” Lister says, too tired to tell him to shut up, and he slaps a hand to the Cat’s shoulder. “Thanks for rescuing us.”

“You call that a rescue?” Rimmer says disdainfully. “I’ve seen more prompt rescues for hornets drowning in lemonade.”

The Cat looks blank. “I got you out, didn’t I? And all I got out of it was the hornet.”

“So what happened?” Lister cuts in as they head back, interrupting before Rimmer can start steaming at the ears. “We’ve heard nothing for hours. Did you manage to fix the problem?”

It seems that one of the skutters went ballistic in the maintenance decks, boring through the back of the primary generator, and three small electric fires later, the whole system went kaput. Apparently, it was well within the remaining skutters’ capabilities to put the fire out, except that they didn’t form an orderly queue to get through the cargo bay doors and got stuck. It turns out that the solution was actually relatively straight-forward once the skutters had actually got through the door, and it only took so long to get them into an orderly queue and achieve that because the Cat kept getting distracted.

“I couldn’t help myself,” the Cat says. “It was so damn peaceful! You know how rare it is for me to get some precious time to myself—so much to lick and claim and sleep on, and so little time!”

Truth be told, Lister doesn’t have the energy to be angry. He is drained through and through, every muscle aching from being on high-alert, a tension headache throbbing behind his eyes. “Cheers, Cat,” he says, and then, not really thinking about it: “Come on, Rimmer.” Like they’ve spent six hours trapped in a tiny room together and Lister still isn’t sick of him. Then again, not entirely—he’s always a bit sick of Rimmer, to the point that he’s almost desensitised to it.

Weirder still is the fact that Rimmer, without so much as batting an eyelid, follows him. No questions asked.

They walk without talking, and Lister can’t think of the last time he was so looking forward to collapsing into bed. Who knew that sitting motionless for six hours could be so exhausting? Rimmer doesn’t even have to sleep, technically, and even he seems tired, withdrawn and quiet.

It’s only a couple of floors up to their quarters, and without speaking, they both go for the stairs.

“I’m not leaving me bed tomorrow,” Lister declares emphatically as they reach their quarters, and he slaps a hand to the door panel.

“So just the usual slobathon, then?”

With a long, exaggerated groan, Lister hauls himself up into his bunk, and once sprawled out on his belly, he toes off his boots and lets them drop to the floor. “You got it,” he says, voice half-muffled in his pillow. “I’m gonna lie in ‘till I start decomposing.”

“Let me know when you start to rot, will you?” Rimmer asks, getting into the bunk below. “I’m not sure I’d be able to differentiate the smell from the usual bewitching scent of your sock hamper.”

Lister shakes his head, and he props his head up on his arm, cheek smushed into the back of his wrist. “You know why Holly picked you?” he asks, after a beat. “For the ship’s only hologram, I mean. For me.”

“Because he’s got a warped sense of humour and needed a bit of a jolly after a few Ice Ages alone?”

“Me and you, we’ve got the most shared words.”

“What?”

“Conversation-wise,” Lister explains. “We’ve got the highest word-count.”

Rimmer pauses, considering this. “Most of those are probably you insulting me.”

Lister snorts a laugh. “That’s what I said.”

“At last, something on which we agree.”

“I don’t think Holly could’ve picked a worse pair if he’d tried,” Lister says.

“Hm. Stalin and Trotsky, perhaps,” Rimmer says, and Lister tries to decide if he’s imagining it, or if that’s a smile he’s hearing in Rimmer’s voice. 

Lister grins. “Wil E. Coyote and Roadrunner.”

“You’re Roadrunner,” Rimmer accuses.

“Yeah, obviously.” Lister rolls his eyes. “Who wants to be the Coyote?”

“The Coyote is only trying to enforce the natural law of the animal kingdom! Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten—Roadrunner is the one causing havoc.”

“Rimmer, the Coyote is the baddie.”

Of course, Rimmer just _tuts._ “Spoken like a true Roadrunner.”

There’s no arguing with some people, Lister thinks, and as he lies sprawled on his belly, one foot hanging off the edge of his bunk, he can’t help thinking through it again—Arnold Rimmer, the best person to keep him sane, apparently. It’s an absolute crock of steaming smeg, Lister stands by his beliefs on that, but… Rimmer helped today. Being trapped in that lift with him wasn’t all that bad, even for six hours in chest-cramping claustrophobia. Sometimes, just sometimes, Lister reckons Rimmer’s alright.

Without really thinking, Lister says, “D’you remember when we, ah—when we did it?”

“When we _did it_?” Rimmer says, scoffing. “I know you have the IQ of a prepubescent football star, but I hadn’t thought you’d adapted the terminology to match.”

Lister rolls his eyes. “What do you want me to call it, then? A quick fuck, making love, shagging, what?”

For a moment, there is an odd sort of stammering sound from below, because Rimmer is nothing if not a hypocrite—chastising Lister for beating around the bush and then too prim to talk about it directly. Then Rimmer clears his throat. “Why don’t we just call it what it really was—namely, nothing,” he says stiffly.

“You what?”

“We didn’t do anything, Lister. You utterly humiliated me and then we went to sleep. I remember it well.”

Well, there is that. Lister rolls over. “Yeah, but it was good before then, weren’t it? I mean—it was alright.”

Rimmer’s voice is prickly now, cold. “You implied I was terrible.”

“Nah, nah.” Lister shakes his head. “No way. I didn’t _imply_ you were lousy in bed, I said it outright. And to be fair to us both, that first time, you _were_ lousy in bed. That other time, though—”

“Yes, it was marvellous,” Rimmer says flatly. “I remember Kristine Kochanski’s involvement being particularly lauded.”

Lister drops his head forwards into the crook of his elbow. “Look, I am sorry about that, man. It just slipped out. I wasn’t thinking—I was drunk.”

Another long silence. Rimmer says, “I know,” and his voice is different, but still not good. Lister likes to think that by now, he’s got pretty good at pinpointing what Rimmer’s every tone of voice means, but he can’t read that one.

“Drunk, scatter-brained, brain-dead, stupid as smeg, but—it was still good,” Lister says. “You were good. I remember that.”

Rimmer says nothing.

“I mean it. Was it the first time you ever did that?”

“You didn’t take my virginity, Lister, if that’s what you’re asking,” Rimmer says, cagey.

“No, I meant…” Lister trails off. _With a man_ , he wants to say, but if it’s a no, he doesn’t want to know, and if it’s a yes, Rimmer won’t want to tell him. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, instead.

Rimmer is silent again, and Lister wishes he could see his face. He’s struggling with these pauses and non-verbal cues. Even if he could see something little, like the line of Rimmer’s mouth or the crease between his eyebrows, he could read him from that, easy. He could know where they stand.

“It was alright, though,” Lister says, thoughtful, after a long moment, and he doesn’t mean to be reliving the memory, but it’s playing out before his eyes again.

Maybe it’s just because it’s been three million years and the extinction of the human race since then, but it seems ten times sexier in hindsight, and Lister’s mouth is coming up dry. The film reel in his head is juddery and imperfect, his memory shaken up like a blender full of Skittles by his time in stasis, but there are details that jump out at him, crystal clear: Rimmer’s fingers digging into his waist. The flush on Rimmer’s skin, his chest heaving with each breath. His open mouth. 

Lister rolls over onto his back with a long sigh, half just thinking out loud, and he says, “Can’t believe you’re probably gonna be the last person I ever shag.”

“How do you think I feel?” Rimmer retorts. “At least you’ve got a chance that might change. Impossible to one, but your odds are still better than mine. At least you’ve got fully functioning genitals.”

Lister’s brow furrows. “What, yours don’t function? What do I keep hearing you doing in your bunk then?”

Rimmer makes a funny, strangled noise, and when he tries to answer, the first few gabbled sounds aren’t words, strictly speaking. “I—d—y—you—I don’t—I mean.” He clears his throat. “I can—on my own, that is. I just can’t—it’s anything else that—anyone else that I can’t—touch,” he finishes, at last, feebly.

Even without looking at him, even in the dark, Lister can feel the embarrassed heat radiating from Rimmer, like a small furnace being stoked in the bottom bunk. Lister settles his clasped hands on his stomach and grins up at the ceiling of his bunk. He says a knowing, “Ah.”

Their sleeping quarters are silent for so long that Lister wonders if Rimmer is falling asleep, the only sound between them the whisper of the air-conditioning unit, the low-level hum of machinery in the walls.

Rimmer interrupts that peace and quiet, demanding, “Anyway—when?”

“Relax, Rimmer, I’m only teasing,” Lister says, and usually this would be an absolutely smegging goldmine for taking the piss out of Rimmer further down the line, but he decides to be gentle with him. “It was only the once I’ve ever heard anything. Few weeks ago, when I couldn’t sleep—and I tuned out quick when I realised what was going on.”

There is a creak of the mattress below. “You should’ve said something,” Rimmer says.

Lister snorts. “Oh, yeah? Like what?” He puts on an obnoxious voice which—by coincidence—is also not a million miles away fromhis Rimmer impression. “ _Excuse me? Sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing that you’re busy flogging the bishop down there, just thought I’d let you know that I’m up now, in case you wanted any pointers.”_

“Oh, alright.” Rimmer’s tone is short and snappy. “I only meant—you should’ve—you could’ve—let me know.”

That takes some puzzling out. Lister can’t tell if he’s being an idiot, or if that’s an invitation in flashing lights that he’s having trouble reading. “Wait,” he says, and he sits up, nearly twatting his head on the top of his bunk recess. “What are you saying?”

Rimmer huffs. “Nothing, you gimboid. Forget it.”

Lister hangs his head down over the edge of his bunk to peer, upside down, at Rimmer, who looks startled to see him there. “You sure?”

Rimmer swats irritably at Lister’s dangling locs. “Piss off, Lister. I’m sure. Go to sleep.”

“Alright, keep your knickers on.” Lister retreats back into his bunk, punches his pillow a few times, and then sprawls out comfortably. He’s not going to push; Rimmer is already the most uptight and anxious person in the galaxy even before they start trying to talk about sex. Best to leave him to it.

Lister drifts groggily in and out of sleep—a bar room brawl with Petersen, Selby, and Chen—how many ping-pong balls would it take to fill G deck?—the way Kochanski had smiled when she first asked him out—what’s the difference between a pigeon and a dove, anyway?—whether Holly stands for something, or is short for something, or what the deal is there—and as he zones out, not quite yet asleep, he is disturbed by a noise.

A shift in the mattress below, sheets rustling. Lister pushes his face back into his pillow, and he isn’t paying attention, really, until he hears the first tell-tale hitch of Rimmer’s breath.

Lister’s eyes crack open. He knows that sound.

He doesn’t move. He isn’t trying to listen, or anything, he’s just confused. He might be wrong. He must be wrong. 

There, again. The snag in Rimmer’s breathing. The slow exhale, trying to let his breath out steadily. Lister’s not wrong.

Lister doesn’t dare to move a muscle in case he gives away that he’s awake, and he strains to listen—okay, he’s listening, but only because he wants to quadruple-check. It sounds like Rimmer genuinely is trying to be quiet. Lister shouldn’t be listening.

He shuts his eyes and tries to think about something else. The skutters, cleaning up after a burst pipe; any of Holly’s terrible jokes; the smell of the Cat’s wax strips burning through his hair; Kris Kochanski dumping him brutally, telling him that she’d never thought it was that serious in the first place; Rimmer with his head tipped back, that desperate whine caught involuntarily in the back of his throat. Smeg. Lister presses his knuckles into his eye-sockets until it hurts.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.

There is the sound of skin on skin, and it’s unmistakable now. The accompanying visual comes uninvited: Rimmer propped up on his elbows, bare chest flushed pink, long fingers pulling himself off. Lister is trying hard not to think about Rimmer’s big hands, his hips lifting into his own touch, and he is trying not to be interested in it with even less success, already half-hard against his thigh.

Right after they were talking about it, as well. Right after Rimmer stammered and scowled and half-issued a totally unclear invitation that Lister still isn’t sure he hallucinated. No way Rimmer would have the balls to do that, though. This isn’t for Lister, this is just—clearing the pipes. Getting it out of his system. Lister knows the feeling. If he knew for certain that one good wank would blast every memory of sex with Rimmer, he would be at it all day and night. He doesn’t want to know what Rimmer tastes like, the breathy little sound he makes when something is really good, the way he goes red to the tips of his ears when he’s close. He doesn’t want to smegging know.

The sound of Rimmer’s movements slow, and against all common sense, Lister wants to know why, heat tightening in his gut. Has he changed his mind? Or is he taking it slow, enjoying himself? He wouldn’t have thought that was Rimmer’s style. He imagines he’d be more brisk, get it over with—wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Get the job done with maximum efficiency.

Below, Rimmer’s breath comes out slow and shaky, and it’s so easy to visualise that Lister just thinks, smeg it _, smeg it,_ and he shoves a hand into his boxers. It’s accidental, the grunt he lets out when he first gets hold of himself, but in the bunk below, Rimmer stops dead.

_Come on, Rimmer._ Lister can’t even hear him breathe now. He wiggles, settling more comfortably into his mattress, and the sound should be a dead giveaway that he’s awake up here, and then he starts. Quick and firm ‘til he’s fully hard, that familiar ache in the pit of his belly, and then slowing down to savour it. He lets out a slow sigh, gripping the base of his dick to hold off the need to come, and then he waits in the dawning realisation that he hasn’t heard anything from Rimmer since he got involved.

He could go down there. He could go down to Rimmer and they could do this together. Alright, he wouldn’t be able to touch him or do anything, but he could see him, talk to him, watch as he finishes. However, the niggling thought in the back of Lister’s head is that this is good, right now, and every single time he’s tried to do anything with Rimmer, one way or another it’s ended in disaster. 

The silence stretches between them, thinner and thinner until it could snap, and they are lying in the dark, not touching, listening to each other breathe, and waiting. Lister wants to carry on so badly it’s almost uncomfortable, but he needs to wait for some kind of confirmation from Rimmer that this is happening. A sign, anything.

Lister is just beginning to give up hope, his dick throbbing painfully in his boxers, when finally, at smegging last, Rimmer exhales, long, slow and shivering. His mattress squeaks, just once. The slow, quiet sound of his now-slick fist—God. It sears new heat through Lister, and he tips his head back against his pillow for a deep breath as he gives into the urge to move, to touch.

He tilts his hips for better access into his boxers, keeps his grip tantalisingly loose, and he doesn’t pretend his hand is Rimmer, but in his head, he is replaying the wet slide of his fingers into Rimmer’s mouth, the heat of his tongue, his lips, the choked noise he made when Lister held him there and kept him quiet.

As if on cue—in the bunk below, a half-stifled sound, a soft groan. The visual comes with it, Rimmer’s slack mouth, the quick slide of his fist, the head of his dick hot and slick in his hand, and Lister’s arousal curls tighter around the base of his spine, imagines tasting Rimmer again, properly this time, pushing his tongue into his mouth, pressing him down into the bed until he is desperate for anything, anything. He lets out his breath in a burst, and with it, “Rimmer—”

Rimmer makes a devastating noise, all at once strangled and breathless and needing, and Lister wants so badly to climb down and see him, see if his back arches off the mattress as he gasps for breath, but he doesn’t want to ruin this like they’ve ruined it before. Instead, his hand tightens on his own dick, moves faster, stoking that fire, and without thinking, he’s muttering, “Come on, come on,” and he can hear Rimmer breathing ragged.

Then Rimmer’s breath cuts out—there is a low, wordless sound—a long, shuddering exhalation. The mattress squeaks again, and then nothing.

It doesn’t take much to get Lister right to the edge with him, and the image of Rimmer coming certainly helps, firing him up hotter and faster until his blood is a white-hot arrow between his legs, and he’s close, he wants, and he comes with a low moan. Then, just for a laugh, grinning, he says, “Geronimo.”

From below him, Rimmer huffs. Hard to say if it’s pissed off or if it might be a laugh.

Lister mops up the mess from his belly with a handful of his T-shirt—it’s pretty crusty anyway, who gives a smeg?—and then rolls over onto his stomach. “Night, Rimmer,” he says cheerfully, burying himself deep into his pillow.

After a beat, Rimmer says, “Goodnight,” and his voice is unsteady.

***


	3. Khaki

**III**

Kryten brings out the worst in Rimmer. You call him _sir_ one smegging time and it goes instantly to his head, until his already impressive ego rivals _Red Dwarf_ itself in size, and that carries over to everything else. There’s renewed self-importance in the way he orders the skutters about; an extra pronounced curl to his sneer when he looks down his nose at the Cat; he speaks to Holly in the loud, slow tones of someone trying to give directions to a deaf Russian. It’s poor Kryten that gets the brunt of it, though, and Lister can only dedicate so much time and effort to running around defending him like a helicopter parent at a posh nursery.

Rimmer has him waxing the floors, polishing every flat surface on the ship until he can see his reflection in it, spraying every nozzle and switch in the drive room to get the metallic sheen up to scratch, swapping the hand-soap in the men’s lavs from lemon-scented to apple-scented. On one particularly aggravating day, Rimmer has him going through every one of the officers’ quarters to find their uniform and pull their ranking insignia off, presumably so that none of the dead forget that Rimmer is technically the most senior person on board now. Chance would be a fine thing—Rimmer never shuts up about it.

Even Holly has taken to avoiding him, sticking up a BACK LATER sign whenever Rimmer starts imperiously giving out orders. Some days Lister is worried that Holly will find a way to self-destruct the hologram projection room at the cost of the whole ship; other days, Lister thinks that’s a risk worth taking.

Today could go either way. Somehow Lister’s not seen Rimmer for much of the day; he was up at stupid o’clock doing loud, excessively energetic calisthenics (chanting, _here we go, feel the burn, push through the pain, that’s the way to do it_ at maximum volume even when Lister threw his pillow, both socks, and his hat through him). Since, however, Rimmer has presumably been off somewhere else, which would be just fine by Lister if it weren’t for the fact that now he needs Kryten, and he has the feeling the two absences might be in some way linked.

Lister raps on the door-frame into the cinema room and leans through. “Hey, Cat. Have you seen Kryten?”

“What am I, his babysitter?” the Cat asks. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a Square Head convention he had to go to.”

“If you see him around, can you mention that I’ve been looking for him?”

“If I see who?”

“Kryten,” Lister repeats.

The Cat looks up. “What about him?”

“Oh, forget it.” Lister leaves, heading down towards the medical bay in the hopes that maybe Kryten will be puzzling over the hygiene standards of the pharmaceutical cupboards again. 

However, as he’s making his way down the corridor towards the service lift, he catches the sound of Rimmer’s most high-pitched, outraged squawk, and Lister reckons that seems as likely an option as any. He heads back towards his sleeping quarters, and sure enough, the closer he gets, the more easily he can distinguish Rimmer’s barrage of insults as aimed at Kryten.

“—realm of reality in which this crease is anything remotely approaching straight? Allow me to let you in on a little layman’s secret, Kryten—if you have to get out a spirit level to check it’s crisp enough, then it _isn’t crisp enough._ ”

Lister comes in through the open door and says, “Shut up, Rimmer.”

Rimmer wheels around to face him. “How—”

“I’ve got no idea what you’re on about, but I just reckoned someone probably needed to tell you to shut up. What the smeg are you shouting for?”

“I’m not shouting,” Rimmer says, in a voice that not-so-carefully treads the line between a very loud announcement and going totally ballistic. “I am merely explaining to Kryten my expectations for a crisply ironed pair of trousers, but it seems that the concept is just a trifle too difficult for this enormous metal dildo to comprehend, because he expects to pass off this unholy travesty—” Here he points at a pair of immaculately starched and ironed trousers, held in Kryten’s hands, “—as _acceptable_! I wouldn’t use ironing of that standard to wipe down a toilet seat!”

Lister stares between the two of them. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Exactly what I wanted to know!” Rimmer crows. “Exactly! It’s obscene, it’s a disgrace to—”

“No, _you,_ Rimmer,” Lister says. “What the smeg do you need your clothes ironing for? You can’t even wear them anymore!”

“That’s exactly what I wondered, sir,” Kryten says miserably. “But there’s no arguing with him, he’s quite mad.”

“I am not mad!” Rimmer’s voice pitches up wildly into outrage again. “I’m just dead, and so sue me, I’m a little incensed that _some people_ seem to think that just because I am dead, that I don’t have the same rights as those of us who are still breathing.”

“But, sir, if you can’t wear this uniform, why does it need to be—”

“Because I ordered you to, and as the highest ranking technician on board _Red Dwarf,_ you need to follow those commands—no questions asked! Besides, what if one day I get my body back, and then I go to get dressed and everything is a crumpled, stinking mess? What a fine commanding officer I’d look, then—Captain Homeless, I can see it now. Lieutenant Admiral Rooting-Around-The-Bins-Behind-The-Supermarket.”

“But Mr. Rimmer, sir, I only ironed these yesterday—”

“Kryten, put the iron down,” Lister says, and he puts himself between Rimmer and Kryten just as Rimmer looks like he’s considering launching himself into battle, hands or no hands. “What are you playing at, Rimmer?”

“Lister, you do not have the authority to countermand my orders—”

“Smeg off,” Lister tells him flatly, and he snatches the trousers from Kryten. “This is ridiculous. You don’t need any of these clothes—you can’t wear them! You just tell Holly what to put you in like a big, ugly dress-up doll—”

“I resent that!”

“—and Holly just magics it out of thin air!” Lister crosses to Rimmer’s locker, yanks it open, and starts rifling through. “So what do you need four pairs of identical trousers for? Why does it matter what the creases are like?” And with that, he grabs the lot, marches them across to the bin, and dumps the whole pile unceremoniously in, hangers and all.

“Those are mine!” Rimmer squawks.

“You haven’t worn them in three years,” Lister says.

“Because I’m dead!”

“Yeah, exactly! So it doesn’t matter what we do with your clothes because you’re not gonna be wearing them any time soon! If, in some miraculous turn of chance, you get your body back, then fine, great, the first thing we’ll do is take you on a big shopping spree and iron everything to perfection—but at the minute, you don’t smegging need them.”

“How would you like it if I went round destroying your things just because technically you’re not using them?” Rimmer demands, following him around the room. “Right—let’s see. Well, it’s been a few days since you had a shave, so let’s chuck your razor in the bin, shall we? And I’ve not heard from your guitar in a while—Kryten, flush it out the airlock.”

Across the room, Lister points a finger at Kryten. “Don’t even think about it,” he warns. Then, to Rimmer: “So what I’m hearing is that you want me to play me guitar more often.”

“No. No, that’s not—don’t twist this.”

“Besides, Rimmer, there’s a bit of difference between, what, four days since I last played my guitar—”

“Five,” Kryten says, and he points at the sign on a chalkboard propped up in the corner by the window: _IT HAS BEEN 5 DAYS SINCE LISTER LAST DESTROYED MY EARDRUMS_ , etched in the wobbly scrawl of a poorly-coordinated skutter.

“—and you being dead and unable to ever wear clothes again.”

“What else shall we get rid of?” Rimmer says, loud and obnoxious, ignoring Lister completely and tapping his own chin with his index finger in exaggerated thoughtfulness. “Hmm. Well, you’ve never put any of your clothes away, so let’s just get rid of your entire locker! What’s more, I don’t think you’ve been to the loo recently, so let’s just—”

The toilet spins around on voice-command.

“Back off, Rimmer,” Lister threatens. “Leave the toilet out of this.”

The toilet spins back.

“But why, Lister?” Rimmer wheedles. “After all, you’re not using it.”

“If I come in here tonight with a vindaloo gut and you’ve got rid of the smegging toilet, I am going to get Holly to turn you off once and for all.”

“Well, you’ll just have to violently evacuate your bowels somewhere else, I suppose,” Rimmer says. “And what a shame! What a loss—”

“I’m not kidding, Rimmer, if you so much as unscrew the cistern I’ll—”

“Sorry, Lister, can’t hear you. Haven’t been using my ears a lot recently so I just—threw them away,” Rimmer goes on pleasantly, and he turns to Kryten. “Be a dear, Kryten, and destroy the toilet.”

The toilet spins.

Kryten’s face contorts. “Please don’t make me, sir.”

Lister vaults the table, sending a chessboard flying, and gets physically between them. “Do not touch the toilet, Kryten.”

“Sir, I—”

“Kryten, are you listening to me? Destroy it!”

“Do _not—_ ”

“Please, sirs,” Kryten whimpers. “I can’t follow both orders and I don’t—”

“I’m the superior officer here, and I command you to—”

“I’m pretty sure living crew members always outrank hologrammatic—”

“Oh, here we go again with these discriminatory comments—what’s next? Do you want to commandeer my parking space as well, or—”

“Piss off, Rimmer—and Kryten, you can tell him to piss off as well, you know, you don’t have to toady around him and let him act like Mr. Big Bollocks when—”

Kryten lets out one short wail, and then there is a sound of crackling static, a pop that flickers white light behind his eyes, and he goes silent, slumped at the shoulders, smoke threading thinly from his ears.

For a moment, Lister and Rimmer are both silent, staring at the rising smoke.

Rimmer says, “Well, now look what you’ve done.”

Lister cracks his knuckles.

***

According to Holly, the faint sucking noise overhead is nothing major, nothing life-threatening. Just a minor problem with the atmospheric pressure regulator, which Lister might not know much about, but which sounds to his layman’s ears like some pretty essential life support systems. 

“It’s still not _terrible_ ,” Holly says, her voice a slow, thoughtful wheedle. “Not life-threatening. More like life-bothering, really. Like, not ideal, but probably won’t implode and kill you all anytime soon.”

“When you say _probably_ ,” Rimmer says, “could you go into just a smidgen more detail for us? Is that _probably_ as in the scientists at Chernobyl will _probably_ come out this with nothing more than a nasty sunburn, or as in Apollo 13 _probably_ didn’t need that oxygen supply anyway?”

“Well, it is a bit Chernobyl-y,” Holly says, considering. “Just a bit, though. A six out of ten.”

“Where ten is all of us surviving without any problems?” the Cat asks.

“Other way round.”

Rimmer says, “Ah.”

“A sixty percent chance of catastrophic failure?” Kryten says, aghast. “We have better odds of surviving the Black Death.”

“These odds are always a bit iffy, though,” Holly says. “Technically, it does also say there’s a fifteen percent chance you’re dead already.”

“Well,” says Rimmer.

“Shut up, Rimmer.” Lister takes a deep breath. “Right. So, what happens if the atmospheric pressure regulator gives in?”

“Well, it stops regulating the atmospheric pressure, dunnit?”

Lister closes his eyes, pained. “But what does that _mean_?”

Kryten holds up a hand to cut in. “It means that the pressure inside your bodies will no longer be equal to the pressure outside your bodies. As a result, all the liquid in your body would very suddenly need to escape. Have you ever stood on a grape, Mr. Lister, sir?” He nods sagely at Lister’s horror-struck expression. “In this scenario, you’re the grape.”

“Yeah, I got that, thanks.”

“For one thing, it means the drive room’s gonna get a lovely new red paint job,” Holly adds.

“Say no more,” Rimmer says, and claps his hands together briskly. “Escape pod, anyone?”

“Hol, boot up _Starbug_ for us,” Lister tells her. “Let’s get out of here. Emergency evacuation, pronto.” He points at the Cat. “Essentials only.”

“I got it, I’m with you,” the Cat says. “Only three pocket-squares.”

“Hang on, I’m in command here,” Rimmer says. “I should be the one to give the order to evacuate.”

Lister pauses, one hand on the door-frame on his way out. “I mean, you can,” he says, “but no-one’s listening to you.” And then he carries on his way, paying no attention to the sound of Rimmer’s outraged spluttering behind him.

So, the plan is this: pilot _Starbug_ into space in search of something that they could use to repair the atmospheric pressure regulator, or better still a replacement. According to Kryten’s psi-scan, there is an S1 planet only a few days flying from _Red Dwarf_ , where a weak radio signal is being emitted. Kryten reckons there’s a derelict down there at the very least, and their best bet for salvaging something useful. A week of flying with fingers crossed, and hopefully a happy ending at the other end of it.

Truth be told, aside from twenty-four-seven alternating shifts at the helm, their routine doesn’t change much. They bicker, they play inane games to pass the time, they eat curries, they argue some more until someone either backs down or goes off to sulk in another room. Usually Rimmer. Almost always Rimmer.

Since they evacuated _Red Dwarf_ , Rimmer and Lister must have had up of thirty arguments, some of which have been repeats, including but not limited to:

  * Rimmer tried to reprogram the escape pod to respond only to his voice
  * Lister wouldn’t stop humming the same two bars of _Lunar City 7_ , because so sue him, they were stuck in his head
  * Rimmer claimed that not brushing your teeth was a crime punishable by lashings
  * Lister deleted Rimmer’s voice entry on the ship’s computer cataloguing a handful of new moles that he’d recently found on his upper arm, which is stupid because _of course you’ve not got melanoma, Rimmer, you’re already smegging dead_
  * Lister chewing with his mouth open
  * Lister chewing with his mouth closed, which is apparently still too loud
  * Rimmer spending twenty minutes picking lint out of the seams of his quilted jacket and loudly complaining the whole time about deteriorating uniform standards



It’s getting ridiculous.

Lister can’t understand it—how can it be possible to want to stove someone’s head in with a lead pipe and still, at the same time, be really into them? Because Rimmer’s an annoying, pedantic, arrogant, pompous, weaselly wanker, but he’s also a laugh sometimes in a way that Kryten and the Cat hardly ever are, and he’s human, and alright, the bar is pretty low on that one, but Rimmer’s the only one left who gets it, who properly remembers and misses their old life like Lister does, and sometimes he’s decent, and sometimes when he’s being daft it’s endearing and not aggravating, and if he ever left behind that aggressive side-parting and the boatful of gel required to make his hair lie flat, he could even be quite handsome.

And it infuriates Lister—when it’s unbearable to be in the same room as the only person who smirks at your jokes.

They’ve been flying out for just under a week now, and are getting close, according to Kryten’s calculations. It’s six in the morning when Lister hauls himself up out of bed to take over the helm for the next shift, but as he goes trudging barefoot into the cockpit, it’s not the Cat he finds in the pilot’s seat, but Rimmer.

“What are you doing here?” Lister says, and yawns massively without trying to cover it, because he knows Rimmer hates it.

“Building a nice conservatory on the side of Hadrian’s Wall,” Rimmer says, eyeing Lister with disdain. “Do you mind? I think I just saw all the way down to last night’s dinner.”

Lister drops himself heavily into the co-pilot’s seat. “Yeah, okay, I can see what you’re doing—but why you?” he asks. “You can’t fly.”

“Yes, I can,” Rimmer argues. “And a damn sight better than you, I might add.”

“How can you fly if you can’t touch anything, though?”

“Well, he isn’t, really,” Holly chips in from the corner, with a roll of her eyes. “Autopilot—what a laugh that one is.”

“Cat’s gone to get coffee,” Rimmer admits. “I said I’d stand in for him, man the buttons, you know. Just in case anything happens.”

Lister snorts, and he kicks back to prop his bare feet on the control panel. “What are you gonna do, suss out the best places for him to hide and cry? Write a review for Cowards Weekly?”

“Hardy-har-har, very funny. Get your feet down.”

Lister wiggles his toes at him.

“Erm, Dave… I don’t think your toes are supposed to be green,” Holly says, a look of mingled horror and concern crossing her face.

“No, it’s just the dye coming off his socks because he never washes them,” Rimmer says, in the bored tone of someone who has had this conversation with multiple people and is thoroughly tired of it. “I’m sure there’s lots medically wrong with Lister, but gangrene, unfortunately, isn’t one of them. _Off_ the dash, though, before whatever fungus I’m sure is growing there spreads to the rest of us.”

Lister makes a face, twirls his hand in a mockery of Rimmer’s crap salute, but does put his feet down.

A loud _eyyyyyyy_ comes through the door behind them, and Lister glances over at Rimmer. “That’ll be you coming off-duty, then,” he says, and the Cat comes in, cradling his coffee in two hands.

“You know, there’s not much you monkeys get right, but this? This?” The Cat inhales deeply over the steam curling from his mug. “Whoo-ee. They should’ve let you guys invent more stuff—you’re not bad at it!”

“Anything interesting happen in your shift?” Lister asks.

“Hmm, let me see.” The Cat’s brow furrows. “I had a little power-nap at about three… and then at three-thirty, I looked really good. Four o’clock was dicey. I thought for a second that maybe I had pulled a thread in my jacket, but it was a loose thread from the chair. So I still looked good. Not much else to report, no.”

Lister and Rimmer’s eyes meet.

“Well, there you have it,” Rimmer says drily. “Nothing to worry about.”

Lister shakes his head. “Alright. I’ll take it from here. Hol, you can go back to bed.”

“Thank God.”

The Cat leads the way out, slurping noisily at his coffee all the way, and as Rimmer levers himself out of the pilot’s chair to follow, for a moment his hand drifts near Lister’s shoulder—and Lister can almost feel it already, the weight of his palm in an easy, comfortable touch on his way out—and then Rimmer’s hand falls. He goes out, and Lister listens to the clatter of his footsteps down the steps until all trace of him is gone.

Lister doesn’t mean to turn and glance down the steps after him, just in case he can still see Rimmer dicking about somewhere. He just—sort of wonders, and then he glances without thinking about it, and then he feels stupid. He knuckles roughly at the grit in the corner of his eye, and turns back to the controls.

***

At last, Kryten’s psi-scan comes through for them, and when _Starbug_ touches down heavily on the surface of the small moon where the derelict is reported to be, they have a clear radio signal to track. Holly estimates that the ship signal is within three miles—not too far, in the grand scheme of things—and so they get ready to gear up and go.

“I’ll man the ship,” Rimmer says instantly, and gives them all a wide smile. “Off you pop, cheerio. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Lister rolls his eyes and gets to his feet. “If I didn’t do anything you wouldn’t do, I wouldn’t do anything,” he says.

“I recommend we don full space-suits,” Kryten says. “The atmosphere here is safe, but we must be careful, as this moon does register as having sentient life-forms.”

“How big?” the Cat asks.

“According to my readings, they are very small, but that doesn’t mean they might not be dangerous,” Kryten says. “Think of some of Earth’s smallest life-forms—black widow spiders, deathstalker scorpions, cone snails—but each could kill a fully-grown man in minutes. We need to stay alert at all times, and be careful to keep our suits tightly sealed.”

Lister nods. “Right. Gloves on, helmets on. Don’t pick up anything little and wriggly.”

The Cat looks dismayed. “But what if I’m hungry?”

“Don’t.”

Together they head down into the body of _Starbug_ to suit up and boot up for the space-walk. They pause in the airlock to check for gaps in their suits, to check that they can still contact Rimmer over the headsets, and then they open up _Starbug_ and descend onto the moon’s surface. The gravity is fairly similar to Earth, if slightly stronger, so that it feels like walking through thick mud. In orbit around the planetoid is a second, smaller moon, which casts an unsteady silver light over them.

The derelict is easy enough to find, in the end, a regular _ping_ coming over their in-suit headset as they track the radio signal. They crest the lip of a steep, craggy crater, and there it lies, tilted almost on its side, half the metal peeled back and charred in whatever fire took it down.

“Jesus,” Lister says. “Wouldn’t have wanted to be on-board when that happened.”

“What? What is it?” Rimmer’s voice crackles over the headset. “Angle your camera, I can’t see anything.”

Lister can’t be bothered to adjust the camera on his suit; he tips his head over. Kryten leads the way down into the crater, scanning as he goes to be sure that they aren’t going to stumble on any pockets of dangerous gases or anything else that might want to kill them. The Cat goes in the middle, mostly because Lister doesn’t trust him not to wander off if he takes his eye off him, and Lister takes the rear, clambering down carefully.

“It’s doubtful that this small a craft would have a regulator compatible with a ship of _Red Dwarf_ ’s size,” Kryten says. “Nevertheless, there may be equipment that we can use in patching our own.”

“You want me to wear patches?” the Cat says incredulously. “No thanks! I’ll take my chances with Little Miss Implosion back on the ship.”

“See if they’ve got any films,” Rimmer says. “If I have to watch _Revenge of the Banshee Bride_ one more time, I’m going to kill myself. Again.”

“But you love _Revenge of the Banshee Bride_ ,” Lister says, picking his way through twisted metal and rubble. “I distinctly remember you saying how much you loved all the heads getting blown up—”

The Cat gives out an ear-piercing screech and leaps nearly two or three feet straight upwards, legs rigid, and Lister jerks backwards out of the impact zone. In doing so, his foot gets caught on the rock behind him, and he goes down hard on his arse.

“Watch it!” Lister yells, more out of shock than pain—he’ll probably have a bruise on his tailbone but nothing more substantial. “You’re a total menace, Cat. The smeg are you doing?”

“There was something long and wriggly!” the Cat protests. “That’s the worst kind of wriggly thing. They aren’t even fun to chase. What was I supposed to do?”

Lister heaves himself back up onto his feet, but as he straightens, Kryten gasps. “Sir—your suit,” he says falteringly, and he points. Lister lifts his arm to follow his direction, twists, and finds a small hole punctured into the back of his suit, just below his shoulder. “Recommend we return to _Starbug_ immediately.”

“If we do find anything useful, we’re gonna needs all hands on deck to get it back to _Starbug._ I’ll be fine.”

Rimmer’s voice crackles through the headset. “What’s happening?”

Lister ignores him. “Come on. The quicker we get there, the quicker we get back.”

The headset buzzes angrily in Lister’s suit. “Hello? What’s going on? Someone tell me what’s happening!”

“Nothing,” Lister says, at the exact same second that the Cat announces, “Dogface’s got a hole in his suit.”

“What?!”

“Sorry, Rimmer—you’re breaking up,” Lister says, and then, in what he hopes passes as a decent approximation of a broken radio, says, “ _Zzzsk—ccrrrkkssk_ —back soon— _ghhrrzzhk_ —smeg-head— _zzzhhsskk_ —over and out.” Then he turns the radio off, and leads the way across the rubble to the derelict, where a hole has been ripped in the side.

“Oh, dear,” Kryten says, and follows.

Once they climb inside, Lister clicks on a torch and starts searching for any sign that could direct them towards the maintenance decks. It takes a few twists and turns down narrow corridors, made especially difficult by the slant of the ship, but at last, Lister finds a metal sign buckled to the wall: _Kajuto 1; Lo_ _ĝejoj 2; Scienca 3; Provizoj 4; Motoro 5_.

“What’s wrong with these guys?” the Cat asks. “Why can’t they spell?”

“It’s Esperanto,” Lister says. “We want the engine room, but it’s right at the bottom. My bet is there’s not gonna be much down there that isn’t badly damaged from the crash.”

“We may however be able to salvage the necessary materials for repair from the machinery,” Kryten says.

“Yeah. You go take a look. I’ll check out the labs.” Lister turns and slaps a hand to the Cat’s shoulder. “You head to the living quarters. They should be just along this floor. See if there’s anything worth nicking.”

“Anything not screwed down. Got it.”

The torch-light reflects off the dead emergency lighting strips as Lister goes up the stairs towards the science labs. His footsteps echo on the metal steps, and his breath fogs the faceplate of his suit. On the third floor, the door is ajar but won’t budge any further open, frozen in place when the electrics died. He just about wiggles through, his helmet clanking on the metal, and then he gets stuck. He pulls and pulls until finally, with a ripping sound, he forces himself through. When he stands up, the cold air on his back immediately registers what’s happened—he’s just made the problem of the puncture in his suit a whole lot worse.

It’s worth it, though, when he lifts the torch to check around the science labs and sees that all their dreams have come true.

Lister switches his radio back on. “Kryten, Cat,” he says. “Up on the science deck. It’s a colonisation ship. They’ve got everything up here for setting up a habitat—including a massive pressure regulator. Doesn’t look too badly damaged either.”

“Nicely done, Lister,” Rimmer says over the headset. “Now go and find me something new to watch.”

Since the equipment is set up to be transported to a new colony, it couldn’t be in better condition—brand-new, dismantled, and still in the original packaging, ready to go. It takes more time finding something to pry the door open wide enough to get the regulator through, and by that point, Kryten and the Cat have made their way up to help.

Next problem—it’s big. Smaller than a sofa, but not by much. Big enough that it’s hard work getting it down the stairs, and the moon’s gravity makes it feel a lot heavier than it should, until Lister’s shoulders are aching and he is painfully conscious of the widening tear in his suit every time he bends. Combine that with Rimmer’s unhelpful suggestions over the radio— _can you put it on a trolley? Have you tried all lifting on three? Right, I’ll lead you. Everyone listening? One… two…_ —and Lister is just about ready to throw in the towel.

With every step, rocks skitter underfoot and he runs the risk of turning his ankle over. His fingers slip every few metres so that they have to carefully lower the regulator to the ground and then start all over again, and the Cat is narrating all the snacks he found on the habitation deck, and just when, finally, _Starbug_ is in sight and relief sinks through him, that’s when Lister feels it. 

A slow, scuttling sensation, something small and cold with a lot of legs, climbing over his shoulder and down into his sleeve.

Lister freezes. “Kryten?” he calls. “Something’s in my suit.”

Kryten looks at him across the regulator, eyes widening. “Where?”

Lister darts his eyes frantically at the arm he holds out stiffly to one side, elbow cocked awkwardly away from the regulator as he carries it. “Help. Please help.”

“There’s nothing I can do from here,” Kryten says. “We need to get you back to the ship.”

“Hold on, hold on, I can’t carry this on my own!” the Cat cuts in. “These muscles are for appearance only—I’m not cut out for heavy lifting!”

Lister takes a deep breath. “Just keep going. We’re not far. Keep going.”

Kryten says, “Mr. Rimmer, could you please have the medibot on stand-by?”

Lister tries to walk faster, pushing as fast as he can, but the regulator is heavy and they all have to stumble together across the craggy surface. It’s only a hundred feet or so, now. Sweat is beading on the back of Lister’s neck. His fingers are slippery inside his gloves. He can feel the thing—whatever it is—settling down just shy of his elbow, and he can feel the scrape of something sharp against his skin.

Lister swears that even through his helmet, he can hear Rimmer’s voice rising shrilly from Kryten’s headset, even if he can’t distinguish the words. He tries not to think about anything except the fifty remaining feet to _Starbug_ , the ramp to the airlock, and getting there as fast and as smoothly as he can.

Sweat gathers in the crook of Lister’s elbow. He feels one droplet form and slowly trickle down the inside of his forearm towards his wrist.

Whatever is camping out in Lister’s sleeve, it slips on his sweaty skin, legs scrabbling—and then Lister loses the ability to keep track of it all because there is a pain like his elbow has just been wrenched out of its socket, smashed to a bloody pulp with a sledgehammer, and then tipped into a blender. The pain is so sharp and absolute that Lister can’t even form words, just gasps out loud, and then he lets the regulator go.

It crashes to the ground. Cat is complaining about something. Kryten’s face floats in front of Lister, but Lister is preoccupied by the realisation that something burrowing under his skin, and he feels like he’s gonna throw up. He staggers, his vision spinning. One of his knees buckles, and then he does vomit, all inside his spacesuit helmet, and mercifully that’s when he blacks out.

***

Early morning sunlight spills through the slat-blinds, and Lister squints in the glow, groggily lifts a hand to shield his eyes. “Five more minutes,” he mumbles, but he’s opened his eyes wide enough already to see the clear blue sky through the bay window, the white gauze curtains rippling in the breeze. He knuckles at his eyes, blinking to clear the sleep from his eyes, and takes in his surroundings.

A king-size bed with white sheets and a heavy blanket in a colour that Rimmer would call duck-egg, because he’s a pretentious twonk. The bedroom is massive, with wood furniture in matching muted tones. There is a painting on the far wall, a vibrant thing in thick acrylic paint, depicting a sailboat surrounded by gulls.

Lister drags a hand over his face. “Where the smeg am I?” he mutters, and kicks out of the blankets to get up. “Rimmer? What’s going on? You’ve not got Kryten redecorating again, have you?”

He opens the bedroom door and finds himself not in the familiar, bleak rooms of _Starbug,_ but on a narrow, cream-carpeted landing. He follows the teal runner along to the stairs, and slowly descends into an equally massive, equally bland living room space. There is a tall bookshelf, and beside it, an easel, positioned at an angle to allow it to look into the garden—because there’s a smegging _garden_. Grass and soil and plants and dirt and a watering can and the sky above, filled with clouds that look like they’ve been printed out and tacked up from a Perfect Day magazine.

“No way,” Lister says. “No way is this real.” He turns around, back to the terrifyingly bland living room. “Rimmer? Holly, are you there? Can anyone hear me?”

A door on the other side of the room opens, and in steps Kochanski.

Lister forgets what he was going to say.

“Morning, Dave,” she says with a smile. “Sleep well?”

“Uhhhhh,” Lister says.

She crosses towards him. She is wearing loose green trousers and a white top with lacey bits on the shoulders, and her hair is clipped back on one side. “You alright?”

“I’m alright, I’m just mega confused, because you’re dead and I’m in deep space and this isn’t my house and nothing here makes sense,” Lister says, as calmly as he can manage. “So that’s what I’m dealing with. How are you?”

Krissie’s lovely face crinkles into a frown, and she steps in close to stroke a hand over his brow. “You’re not coming down with something, are you? Because you’re right, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re dead,” Lister insists. “And you and me never got together anyway.” Only, the more he says it, the less sense it makes. 

“Oh, really?” Krissie gives him a wicked grin. “Sounds like that version had better taste.”

“Hey!” Lister says, and he grabs her by the waist. She’s warm, real, under his hand—because why wouldn’t she be? Why on earth would Krissie get killed in a radiation leak? She’s never been into space—what is she meant to be, some kind of astronaut? What does that make him?

“You didn’t hit your head getting out of bed, did you?” she checks. “Or give yourself a concussion in your sleep?”

“Don’t think so.” Lister shakes his head, and he kisses her forehead. He breathes in the smell of her shampoo. “Sorry, darlin’. Just a weird dream, I reckon.”

“What about?”

“It’s hard to explain,” Lister says, trying to piece it together now, but the further he gets from sleep, the less clear it seems. “It was like—we were on a big spaceship. I think I worked there, and you did, too. Lots of us did, but then… I’m not sure. Everyone died, but not me.”

“Were you some sort of superhero, to survive it?”

“No, I think I was just an idiot. And Rimmer—”

Lister stops.

Krissie pulls back to look up at him. “What’s a Rimmer?”

Lister opens his mouth and goes no further. His head hurts, pulling shards of a half-forgotten dream out of his clouded brain. “Rimmer,” he says again. “Rimmer was—my friend. Wait, no. He—”

“Come on,” Krissie says, and she takes his hands. She jerks her head in the direction of the door she came through. “I was just putting the kettle on. You have a cuppa while I get dressed, space cadet. I’ll be back in a tick.”

Obediently, Lister trails through to the kitchen, a narrow room in tasteful grey tiles, tidy with potted plants along the windowsill. In a pot by the oven, there are two spatulas—one wooden, one metal. Both are clean. They have several wooden spoons, and a lemon zester. Lister feels unsettled to his core, but he can’t put his finger on why.

Sure enough, as Krissie said, there’s a kettle steaming on the far side, and two mugs set out. One mug says MR. RIGHT and the other says MRS. ALWAYS RIGHT.

Lister stands at the counter, hands braced on the surface, and tries to remember the dream that is still bothering him. It wasn’t a nightmare, he doesn’t think. He didn’t wake up in a panic or anything, and he doesn’t remember anything about it that was particularly scary. There was a robot, but a nice robot. Something about a cat. And there was also—

The toaster pings. 

Lister lifts his head. He didn’t even realise that the toaster was on. As he looks across, he sees that there is another painting on the wall—the same blocky, brightly coloured style as the one in the bedroom, except this one is twice the size and aggressively orange. It’s big enough and dramatic enough that Lister looks at it properly, and that’s when he sees the scrawled signature in the bottom. _D. Lister._

Incredible to think that so few people get that big, lucky break in the art world, and then here’s Dave Lister, working class kid made good, scraping his way up from the bottom to become one of the most respected—no, revered—figures in modern art. Between his incredible career and the love of his life, he’s gotta be the luckiest man alive.

He gets up to retrieve the toast, and he moves on instinct to find plates, knives, butter. It’s all coming back to him now. Hard to believe that for a weird second, he thought none of this was real.

By the time Krissie returns, Dave’s got tea and toast set out for her, there is soft classical music playing through the radio on the windowsill, and birds are singing in the garden. She kisses the top of his head as she passes him, and he stretches to try and slap her arse before she gets out of reach, fails, nearly falls out of his chair, but they’re both laughing and it’s perfect.

That day, they have to run errands—visit a gallery that is due to be exhibiting Dave’s work in a fortnight, check the layout and the lighting to be sure that he’s satisfied; drop by the hospital for the excitement of Krissie’s first ultrasound scan, even though at this point the baby is only the size of a circus peanut; call Dave’s parents, who are over the moon for him, already wondering what the baby’s gender will be, what names they might call the kid; a birthday do for one of Krissie’s old friends, with loads and loads of people that Dave’s not seen in years, but who definitely remember him.

There’s Frank Hollister, Krissie’s old boss, who Dave doesn’t think he ever met while she worked there, but who is still strangely familiar. There’s Kenneth Chen, who Krissie went to school with, and who gets along with Lister like a house on fire, and Tom Selby, who can be a pain in the arse sometimes but still a good laugh, and Dave’s own best mate, Olaf Petersen, who is already drunk when they arrive and making a total fool of himself. They’re dicking about, being raucous, causing as much chaos as they can get away with at a fairly posh barbecue, but between his first lager and his tenth, Dave can’t shake the feeling that something—someone—is missing.

Krissie looks gorgeous and she’s in her element, flitting between one group and another, the light of every conversation she lets herself into, and Dave watches her and finds himself thinking that he barely even knows her. That makes no sense, because she’s his wife and they’ve been together for years, but there are so many unanswered questions—why does she like him? What is she scared of? How did they meet? Why doesn’t he know these things already?

She half-turns to a friend somewhere across the garden, and she calls, “Be a dear, would you—the icebox’s running low on lager and I know at least one customer who’ll need a top-up soon!”

“Aye-aye, captain,” the friend says sarcastically, flicking a hand up to their brow in the world’s laziest salute, and it hits Lister like a kick to the chest.

He reels in his seat, blinking, head spinning, and he says, “Rimmer.”

Olaf turns to frown at him. “You what?”

Lister stands up, knocking his paper plate of greasy barbecued sausages into the grass, and his voice is rising in volume. “Where’s Rimmer?”

Olaf says, “Who?”

Krissie Kochanski—God, _as if_ she’d ever marry him—catches his eye across the garden, and she looks concerned, lovely and perfect and totally unfamiliar, and slowly things are starting to come together again.

“What the smeg is going on?” Lister says, more loudly still. “Rimmer?”

A one-way trip three million years into deep space, sure, a mining ship the size of a city, okay, a robot cleaner and a mega-evolved cat—all that is stuff he could make up in a stupid dream. But Rimmer—no way in smegging hell he could make up _Arnold Rimmer_. No way his unconscious brain could stomach creating something that pedantic, that needlessly petty and spiteful and selfish, that ridiculous and idiotic and hopeless and frightened and stubborn and good—just for the hell of it. No way he can remember him now, as gangly and infuriating as if he was standing right in front of him. His curly hair and narrow face and nostrils you could park a ferry in—no smegging way.

“This isn’t real,” Lister says, backing away from the barbecue, knocking over his plastic chair, even as the people from the barbecue turn towards him, begin to circle, to close in. “This isn’t real. You’re not real. Smeg off, the lot of you. You’re not real, you’re not—”

Lister vomits into a metal bin in the medical bay.

“He’s back!” Kryten cheers, making Lister’s head ring, and he doesn’t know what anyone is so excited about when he feels like he’s died and been dragged under a train for ten miles.

“What—” Lister manages, and then throws up again.

Slowly, the details come together—the fluorescent overhead lighting of the medibay; the cannula of the IV drip going into Lister’s arm; screens flashing and illuminated with details of his heart-rate and respiratory rate; Kryten, excited, holding a clear plastic bucket, through which Lister can glimpse what is easily the most disgusting tiny alien he’s ever seen, complete with massively blood-engorged pincers; the Cat, wrinkling his nose; Rimmer.

“Hungover?” Lister asks, groggy.

“If by ‘hungover’, you mean, ‘did a disgusting beetle thing try to climb inside me’, then yes,” Rimmer says.

Lister blinks at the ceiling, disoriented. “Sandwich?”

“No.”

That doesn’t seem fair. But then again, the whole room is still swirling unevenly around him, so maybe it’s best not to have a snack just yet. Lister gropes about on the medibay bed, not sure what he’s looking for, and then Kryten lays one massive, blocky hand on Lister’s chest to hold him still.

“Don’t try to get up, sir,” he says, trying to be stern and failing. “We had to give you a blood transfusion. You’re still very weak.”

“Also, you’ve been spewing violently from the mouth fairly regularly for the last thirty minutes, so that’s probably not going to help,” Rimmer adds. “Removing your helmet was a joyous experience for us all.”

“What are you complaining about?” the Cat says, glaring at Rimmer. “You didn’t have to get your hands dirty!”

“One of the few perks of not having hands,” Rimmer says smugly.

Lister drops his head back heavily against the pillow with a long sigh. “Did we get the regulator on board?”

“We got it as close as we could drag it on our own, but we’ll need to put together some sort of winch to get it up the ramp.”

Lister nods. “I can do that.”

“You?” Rimmer says derisively, folding his arms across his chest. “You’re not an engineer.”

“Neither are you.”

Rimmer scowls.

“Alright, let’s get this done,” Lister says, and struggles upright. “The quicker we get it on-board, the quicker we can get back to _Red Dwarf_.”

“But Mr. Lister, sir, you’re not strong enough,” Kryten says, fretting around Lister like a mother hen. “You’ve barely finished your blood transfusion.”

“I’m alright.” Lister sways, steadies himself, and presses a hand to his forehead. “If it feels like a hangover, I’m gonna treat it like one. Kryters, get me a pack of lager and a fried egg with enough chilli on it to set off the fire alarm.”

The Cat gasps. “I’ve seen him do this before,” he exclaims. “We’re about to witness a medical miracle.”

“If this kills me, make a shrine out of my guitar—don’t let Rimmer destroy it,” Lister adds.

Rimmer throws his hands in the air. “What is the smegging point?”

With a deep breath, Lister hauls himself up off the medibay cot. For a second, he’s alright—unsteady, wobbling, but alright—and then he tries to step forwards. Instantly, his leg buckles and he drops like a stone; Rimmer jerks instinctively forwards as though to catch him, but Lister sags heavily instead onto Kryten, and slowly Rimmer’s arms drop back to his sides.

“Mr. Lister, sir, please just rest for a moment,” Kryten tells him, while Rimmer hovers anxiously nearby. “I’ll take you to the kitchen but you must sit quietly for a while. You’re still very weak.”

Lister just thinks he’s a credit to himself that he hasn’t puked again.

He gets relegated to a seat—with a meticulously-plumped cushion and a hot-water bottle, because Kryten is Kryten—in the kitchen, and they compromise that Lister will rest for an hour before he starts throwing himself around space again. Lister reckons though that after twenty minutes or so, Kryten will stop paying attention and he can leg it.

For now, it’s just Lister, his disgusting hangover remedy, and Rimmer, standing over him looking totally repulsed. 

“Absolutely disgusting,” Rimmer says, arms folded across his chest.

“Oh, ey—don’t be so hard on yourself,” Lister says, wiping egg yolk from his mouth with his sleeve, and he winks at Rimmer. “You’re doing your best with the haircut you’ve got.”

Rimmer gives him a withering look. “No, you gibbering moron— _you_. I mean, for God’s sake, you’re eating lager like it’s soup.”

“Broth, actually.” Lister lifts a spoon to show off the quivering lump of egg. “Got bits in it, see?”

“And I think,” Rimmer adds, squinting at Lister with revulsion curling his lip, “that you’ve got—oh God. You have. You have vomit still in your hair.”

Lister pulls a face. “Not ideal. But we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

“Cross that bridge.”

“What?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Rimmer says. “Not _burn_ it.”

Lister sets down his spoon. “Gimme a break, man. I came this close to having a chestburster set up camp in my elbow, I’ve puked up a week’s worth of vindaloos—which, by the way, are not less acidic on the way back up—”

Rimmer recoils.

“—and now I’ve got you sneering at me because I don’t know my buildings from my burnings. Or whatever. I don’t care, Rimmer.”

For a moment, Rimmer is quiet. Then, he asks, “What happened?”

Lister slurps up another chunk of egg and the spoonful of surrounding lager-puddle. “Knocked into the Cat, fell down and ripped a hole in me suit. That’s how it got in.”

“No, I meant—once you’d been bitten.”

“I dunno. I passed out more or less straight away.”

“Yes, but... “ Rimmer hesitates, choosing his words. “You were convulsing strangely when you were brought aboard. Then you stopped. Almost like you’d given up. That was the part when it was diciest. And then, out of nowhere, you started convulsing again.” Rimmer pauses again. He fiddles with his hands. “And you said _Rimmer._ ”

Lister looks at him. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I s’pose.”

Neither of them say anything. Lister knows that Rimmer is waiting for him to explain, but to tell the truth, he feels like he barely remembers the hallucination, and what he does remember, he isn’t sure he wants to tell Rimmer about.

Rimmer says, “And?”

Lister shuts his eyes and presses the heels of his hands against his eye sockets. “Smeg, it’s… ridiculous. But it was—it was like a dream. I guess I was hallucinating, but…” He lifts his head. “It was totally mega perfect, like every part of it, but—but it wasn’t real. And I think at the start I could tell. But then, the longer I was in it…”

“So where do I come into this, exactly?” Rimmer asks.

Lister opens his eyes. “No idea,” he lies, and he starts scooping up the dregs of his hangover cure. “It felt so real, though. People, real people, that I could talk to, go round and visit, hang out with.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

Lister looks at Rimmer. “Yours,” he says. “You killed everyone.”

Rimmer bristles. “Not on purpose. And at least you got a break from reality.”

“I nearly died, Rimmer.”

“It sounds like you were happy, though. Even if only for a moment.”

“What, you think that would’ve been worth it? Live fast, die horribly? You’re telling me that if it were you, you’d have just—”

“Oh, no, this doesn’t apply to me,” Rimmer says quickly. “Dying once is quite enough for me, thank you. I’m happy staying put.”

“You’re such a smegging hypocrite.”

“And proud of it.”

When Lister has his strength back—or most of it—they get suited up again and retrieve the regulator from outside _Starbug_. For his part, Lister mostly just helps put together a crude lever and fulcrum to get it onto the ramp, and then directs the Cat and Kryten in heaving the regulator up onto the ship. Lister then helps Kryten to lash it down on the cargo deck so that it doesn’t throw off the balance of the ship as they take off, and then they get ready to head back.

Once _Starbug_ gets out of orbit and starts the slog back to _Red Dwarf_ , Lister drags his away to have a shower and scrub himself clean. He’s not ashamed to admit that it’s overdue, but now the situation is dire, he begrudgingly submits himself to soapy water. He’d never admit it, especially not to the Cat, who is always on at him about his personal hygiene, but he does feel nicer afterwards. Softer, sort of.

He towels himself dry, finds a fresh-ish pair of boxers and a T-shirt, and heads back out. There is Rimmer and the Cat, sat at the little table, sorting through what must be scrap collected from the derelict, except when Lister comes back in, they both look up and Rimmer sort of malfunctions. He goes, “Lister,” and stands up, touches the top of his own head, then says, “Erm,” and sits back down again.

“There’s an intruder on board!” the Cat exclaims. “It’s Lister-shaped but it doesn’t smell like old cheese!”

“Ha. Good one,” Lister says. “Really inventive.” He balls up his towel and tosses it half-heartedly in the direction of their sleeping quarters—falls short, gives up and leaves it there—and turns back to see the Cat rifling again through an eclectic collection of videos and music and books, and Rimmer still staring at him. Lister raises his eyebrows. “What?”

“You look—better,” Rimmer says haltingly, after a beat. “Less putrid, I mean.”

Lister hesitates, one hand on the back of the chair beside the Cat. “Oh. Cheers.” He pulls the chair out and joins them. “So what have we found so far?”

The Cat flips through the items he’s already holding. “Some car chase movies… a couple of great shiny things…” he says, and Lister can see amongst the other crap, he’s hanging onto a pan-scourer, a scrunched-up ball of tin foil, and an empty tea-light. “Oh, and I found a pack of cards that actually has all fifty-two cards!”

Lister grins. “Brutal.” He reaches across the table and grabs a handful for himself to start rifling through. “Hey—Rimmer, have you seen _Fast and Furious 14?_ It’s probably naff but you can always take the piss out of the cars...”

“Hey, look at this shiny thing!” the Cat says in a low voice filled with wonder, and Lister looks over to see him reverently holding a CD up to the light, out of its case. “This is so much shinier than anything else I have.”

Lister snorts a laugh. “That’s not a shiny thing—”

“The hell it isn’t!” The Cat turns it around to peer again into the reflective surface, eyes wide with delight. “I can see my pores in this!”

“It’s a CD, Cat - for music. Give it here, I’ll show you.”

The Cat jerks out of reach, teeth bared. “Hey! No way! You think I’m just gonna give you my shiny thing?”

“Cat, I’m only trying to—Cat!” Lister rears back, cradling his hand against his chest after the Cat has brutally thwacked it, and he looks across at Rimmer for help. “Rimmer, can you do something?”

“What am I supposed to do?” Rimmer says incredulously. “He doesn’t do anything I say. He likes me least of all of us.”

The Cat points at Rimmer. “That’s true.” Then, he slaps Lister again, hard—without prompting.

“Ow!” Lister lifts his arms to shield himself. “Forget it, Cat, I don’t want your smegging shiny thing.”

“See?” Rimmer says. “There’s no reasoning with him.”

“I know!” the Cat exclaims. “The man’s a maniac!” And with that, he gets up and starts gathering up his shiny things—including a new sponge, the backing of a butterfly pin, and the broken nib of a fountain pen. “I can’t believe I thought we were friends,” he mutters. “But all this time, all you wanted was my shiny things. You know, I haven’t been so betrayed since the time Kryten washed all the things I claimed so that they weren’t mine anymore.”

“Cat—”

“Don’t speak to me. Please. Don’t even look at me.” He slinks away with his hoard, muttering tearfully to himself, probably on his way to find something to sulk underneath.

Lister shakes his head. He flaps his abused hand to get some feeling back in it, and then returns to flipping through the pile of tat from the derelict.

There’s a right collection of rubbish here, some good, some useless. There’s a new AR game—some car-racing thing round the elite circuits of Calypso; several bottles of scented shampoo; a half-finished knit scarf with the knitting needles still attached; a paper crown like the kind you get of a Christmas cracker; some brushes with a paint-by-numbers book—and then Lister is just sitting there, holding this last one, lost.

For a moment, he’s almost back with in that dream house with Kochanski and her wicked smile and her baby bump, in their beautiful kitchen, with his art career. But it wasn’t real. None of it was real. Not a touch, not a kiss, not his hand on her arse, not her fingers smoothing out his collar. She was warm and soft and she smelled nice and she wasn’t real.

“—when the gorilla emperor told me that I could rule over _Red Dwarf_ in his stead, if only I would give back my farting certificate and turn in my pink stripes,” Rimmer is saying, and Lister lifts his head.

“What on earth are you on about?” he asks, frowning across at Rimmer, and sees him looking at his watch.

Rimmer pauses the stopwatch. “One minute and thirty-seven seconds. Welcome back, Listy. How was the little holiday you just went on?”

“What?”

“I started talking and you went AWOL for the best part of two minutes—totally zoned out!” Rimmer says. “I thought I’d have to fish your brain out through your ear, like trying to hook the world’s smallest duck.”

“To be fair, I never listen to you anyway.”

Rimmer sits back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. “What’s eating you?”

Lister rubs at his eyes. “Nothing. I just—still don’t feel well.”

“It’s the dream, isn’t it?”

Lister is quiet for a moment. “I nearly gave up,” he says. “Nearly let it take me. When I was in that dream, it was so easy to believe it was real.” He props his mouth against his fist, stares down at the table. “I had everything. This big posh house, and I had Kochanski, and she was pregnant—we had this whole life. I had a career, for smeg’s sake.” Even the idea is laughable—Lister, actually pursuing art like it was something he cared about as opposed to something to point himself towards when he was sixteen and directionless; actually being good enough to make it. “But it got to me. It felt more real than life on _Red Dwarf_ did. Feeling like I was normal again, like I could touch, hold someone again—you can’t imagine.”

“Yeah, can’t imagine what that must have been like, not to be able to touch anyone,” Rimmer says sarcastically. 

Lister looks at him and he realises he’s put his foot in his mouth majorly, like a big idiot. “You know what I mean,” he says awkwardly.

“Yes, I do,” Rimmer remarks. “Thank you for reminding me.”

“I just meant—”

“You don’t need to justify yourself,” Rimmer goes on. “I understand. Hell, if I were the one being whisked away to a wish-granting fantasy of McGruder, featuring the picket fence and all the trimmings, maybe I’d feel the same. Maybe. Either way—it wasn’t real. It didn’t happen.”

“You know me, if you’d told me at any point I was gonna be trapped in deep space, three million years from home, and I had to guess what would be the biggest drain, day to day, I never would’ve guessed this.”

“What?”

“The… not touching,” Lister says wistfully. “Never in a thousand years would’ve guessed that _that_ would be what got me down.”

“Never in three million. Anyway, you can touch Kryten and the Cat,” Rimmer points out.

Lister wrinkles his nose. “Yeah, but why would I want to?”

Rimmer pulls a face. “I take your point. Still, I reckon if you taped a handful of pillows to Kryten to soften some of those sharp edges, he’d be alright. A bit like hugging a Sumo wrestler, I imagine.”

“Sometimes—” Lister catches himself just in time before he blurts out something embarrassing, and he locks that down. “Never mind.”

“Sometimes what?”

“No, forget it. It’s stupid—you’d only make fun of us.”

“Listy,” Rimmer says, low and scandalised. “I’m hurt. When have I ever made fun of you?”

Lister gives him a flat look. “Do you want that alphabetised or by date?” he asks.

“Oh, alright. Well—I won’t.” Rimmer goes through a ridiculous charade of zipping his mouth shut, stitching it closed with a needle and thread, padlocking it, and then hurling the key across the room, “Scout’s honour,” he murmurs out of the corner of his mouth.

Lister’s eyes narrow. “What’re you up to?”

Rimmer huffs. “I don’t have to be up to something,” he says. “I can be nice just for the sake of it.”

“No, you can’t.”

“I can!” Rimmer insists. “Look, I promise I won’t make fun of you. I swear. I swear on—I swear on my swimming certificate.”

“I don’t want your smegging swimming certificate.”

“I swear,” Rimmer says, and then he hesitates. His voice drops into an unintelligible mumble.

Lister leans forwards. “You what?”

Rimmer mumbles again, something that sounds like, _posu_ towards the end, and he avoids meeting Lister’s eyes.

Lister folds his arms across his chest. “Rimmer, I can’t hear a word—”

“I swear on gazpacho soup,” Rimmer says, finally loud and clear.

Lister’s eyebrows lift towards his hairline.

Rimmer lifts his chin, defiant, and he meets Lister’s gaze at last with something of a challenge. “Will that do?”

“I mean,” Lister says, and he hesitates, struggling to articulate why this has so abruptly thrown him. “Yeah. Yeah, it’ll do, but—you sure?”

Once again, Rimmer mimes the zip, stitch, and padlock. “If I make fun of you for whatever you’re about to say, I give you permission to tell the others about… the soup incident.”

To tell the truth, the power rush is dizzying and goes almost immediately to Lister’s head. The urge to just cobble together some total bollocks that Rimmer won’t be able to resist, to bait him into one sneering, derisive comment, and then… No. Lister wrests back control, just about, and so instead he says, out of nowhere, “Sometimes I pet my own hair the way my nan used to.”

He looks at Rimmer, then, waiting. To his credit, Rimmer says nothing. 

“When I was little and I couldn’t sleep,” Lister goes on, not sure why he feels like he needs to explain himself, “she’d stick me on the sofa next to her, let me sprawl out over the cushions, with my head in her lap, and she’d just—” He realises too late that he is already doing it, the movement totally unconscious, fingers idly twisting the baby hair at the nape of his neck, under where his dreads are tied back. It’s a soothing gesture, more than anything else, settling into the rhythmic pull and twist, pull and twist. “Not all the time, like,” he excuses himself, and he drops his hand back to his lap. “Just—you know.”

He can’t bring himself to say it— _when he’s so desperately lonely and touch-starved that he feels like he’d harvest his own organs for the chance to be held._

He doesn’t need to. Rimmer says, “Yeah.”

They are quiet for a moment.

“That’s nowhere near as embarrassing as you led me to believe,” Rimmer says, after a beat. “You got far too good a deal with that. I want—”

“Ah, ah, ah—no take-backs, no do-overs. Nothing, nada. No way.”

Rimmer grumbles, but doesn’t push it any further—and he agrees to watch _Fast and Furious 14_ as long as he’s allowed to complain the whole way through, so Lister takes it as a win.

***

The idea doesn’t come to Lister until they’re back on _Red Dwarf_ two weeks later.

To be honest, Lister reasons with himself, it’s not really anything wildly beyond what he and Rimmer have already been up to. Most nights, when the sleeping quarter lights go out, he and Rimmer settle in their separate bunks into a routine of imagining a willing and enthusiastic participant to play the role of their right hand. Sometimes behind Lister’s eyes it’s Kochanski, or that willowy actress from _Far From Home 2: End of Earth_ when she’s only wearing that thinly draped silver dress at the alien coronation, or it’s Catwoman, and sometimes it’s Rimmer.

In his head, to give him some credit, Lister tries to make it more exciting, to make even imagined sex with Rimmer feel a bit less like watching paint dry. In his head, sometimes Rimmer is soaking wet—like he’s been out in a dramatic storm, until it just turns into Rimmer, the drowned rat, sodden and pathetic—or oiled and gleaming with sweat—until he hears Rimmer’s nasal whine in his own head, _well, this just makes me feel like I’m about to become the main course of a deep-fried Scottish buffet_ , or _how am I supposed to complete this fifty-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of a raw chicken if I’m this slippery—_ and so it almost always comes back to Rimmer, as Lister knows him. Rimmer, as is. 

Either way, Lister is used to pretending, and there have been a handful of times where he’s talked Rimmer off—with the exception of the time that Rimmer told him to shut up and stop ruining his police-woman fantasy—so really, this is only the next most logical step.

As he moves through the habitation decks in search of Rimmer, he becomes aware of his heart going fast against his ribs, his gut wobblier than the Cat’s moral compass, and he realises that he’s smegging nervous. Either that, or he really needs a detour to the loo to drop the kids off at the pool before he tries to proposition Rimmer. 

This, here, is the part that has been increasingly bothering Lister. Not so much the gradual realisation that he actually quite likes Rimmer, although there is that, but more the fact that he doesn’t _mind_ that he likes Rimmer. Since joining _Red Dwarf,_ there have been a handful of times when Lister has felt something like fondness for Rimmer, but in the past, he’s always dismissed them as being like a virus or a cold. We all come down with stupid, snotty colds sometimes when we aren’t careful; sometimes, if he’s not careful, he gets endeared by something stupid Rimmer does. But now, when he is entertained by Rimmer or when Rimmer makes him laugh, there is no rush of disgust in response— _Rimmer? Seriously?_ It’s a part of himself he has come to accept, if not to understand—like a skin tag, or a particularly hairy mole.

As he heads down the corridor, he starts to go over in his head what he’s going to say. “Hey, Rimmer,” he mutters to himself. “Hey. How’s it going? I know we don’t ever really talk about our little situation and whether we’re actually unofficially still sleeping with each other but—no way. Smeg. Smeg.” He tries again. “Hey, Rimmer. Up to much tonight? No, me neither. Well, I was thinking, if you’re not busy and I’m not busy—well, we could—nope. Okay.” He scrubs both hands down over his face, feeling entirely pathetic. “Look, Rimmer. D’you want to have sex with me again?”

He stops in the middle of the corridor, overcome with the urge to slam his head against the wall until he goes unconscious.

There is no reason this needs to be so difficult. For smeg’s sake, it’s Rimmer, not some supermodel bombshell. The guy who used to have a chart to track his bowel movements—if Lister can’t pull that, then it really is the end of the world. This doesn’t need to be this hard.

Lister takes a deep breath. “Rimmer,” he says to the wall. “Hey. This is going to sound weird. I was just wondering if—no, that’s not it. Look—Rimmer.”

“Yes?”

Lister jumps, his heart-rate spiking wildly. “Smegging hell,” he bursts out, clutching at his chest as he staggering back to see Rimmer behind him. “The smeg are you—Jesus. How long have you been standing there?”

“I’ve only just come round the corner,” Rimmer says, and frowns. “Why—how long have you been standing here being odd?”

“I haven’t. I wasn’t.”

Rimmer arches an eyebrow. “You’re about as good a liar as Sweeney Todd was a barber. What are you doing?”

“I was coming to find you.”

“What for?”

Lister chickens out immediately and without hesitation. “We fancied playing badminton and Holly said you wouldn’t mind if we used your light-bee as a shuttlecock.”

“What?” Rimmer recoils. “Of course I mind! What is she thinking?”

“I dunno, man, take it up with her,” Lister says with a shrug, shoving his hands deep into his pockets and sloping away down the corridor. As he walks away, he can still hear Rimmer muttering crossly to himself— _I’d like to know what she thinks gives her right, that ego-inflated tyrannical self-check-out machine—_ and then Lister turns around, quick, before he can bottle it. “Oi, Rimmer.”

“What now?” Rimmer says irritably. “Is there somewhere that I’m needed to cork a wine bottle? A cup of tea needed stirring, perhaps?”

“No,” Lister says. “I was going to ask if you wanted to, erm, play a board game or something tonight.”

“Oh.” Rimmer’s face changes. “What, even—”

“ _Not_ Risk.”

Rimmer grumbles under his breath for a moment. “If it’s Monopoly, I want to be the hat.”

“Fine,” Lister says, unable to bring himself to mention yet that there probably won’t be any board games involved in this particular board game night. “You can be the smegging hat.”

***

“Are you lot joining us?” Rimmer asks later, harmlessly enough, as Kryten is clearing up the dishes from dinner. Lister’s head snaps up, and with wide eyes he tries to get Rimmer’s attention, shaking his head behind Kryten’s back.

“Joining you in what?” Kryten asks.

“In—” Rimmer trails off, having only just spotted Lister, and his brow pulls into a frown. “In—in—”

_Not them,_ Lister mouths, clear as he can, and he drags a finger across his throat, which just makes Rimmer do a stuttering little blink like he’s rebooting.

“In?” Kryten prompts.

Rimmer still looks bewildered, but he turns back to Kryten and the Cat. “In—in an activity that we’re, erm—we’re doing together. Together… without you,” he manages uselessly, somehow making this _activity_ sound more like sex than anything Lister could have said. “You wouldn’t like it.”

“So why’d you invite us?” the Cat demands.

“I didn’t, really.” Rimmer pulls a face, and he looks helplessly towards Lister, who does exactly nothing to get him out of this hole he’s digging. “I was just—sort of… rubbing your noses in it.”

“Well,” Kryten says, huffing his breath, and he holds himself up tall. “That just seems unnecessarily cruel.”

“Catch me wanting to go to your meeting of Dorks Anonymous anyway,” the Cat says.

With a roll of his eyes, Lister drags himself up to his feet. “We’ll catch you later,” he says. “Don’t wait up, kids.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, tilts his head towards the door, and leads the way out, Rimmer following shortly behind. Once they’re out in the corridor, he turns to Rimmer, incredulous. “Jesus, they should get you in MI6.”

“How was I supposed to know that no-one else was invited?” Rimmer says defensively. “You never said!”

As much as Lister hates to admit it, Rimmer has a point—because, yeah, he never got round to explaining that actually he just wants to get off with him, but he’s not gonna try and explain that now, either.

“Besides, I hardly know what exactly we’re going to play with only two of us,” Rimmer continues, utterly oblivious, as they head down the hallway to their sleeping quarters, and he starts ticking off his fingers. “You hate chess, checkers, and backgammon, said _no way_ to Beggar My Neighbour and Egyptian Ratscrew—”

_It’s not too late,_ a voice in Lister’s head points out. _You can change your mind._

“—refused Five Crowns point-blank, and I am _not_ playing Othello with you, not after last time—and since you’ve banned Battleship on pain of death, and Yahtzee is right out—”

_You don’t_ have _to have sex with him_ , the voice points out, as they reach the door and Lister slaps a hand to the door-panel.

_Yeah,_ Lister says resignedly back to the voice. _But I’m going to._

“—so I’m just curious to know exactly what else is left?”

Lister rubs a hand down over his face, and he says, “Look, I don’t wanna play board games with you, full-stop.”

“What? Then what the smeg did you invite me here for?” Rimmer exclaims, and he huffs his breath out, folding his arms. “Can’t believe I bagsied the hat for no reason.”

“You can bagsy the hat next time—look, it doesn’t matter. Rimmer, I—” The words get stuck in Lister’s throat. He thumps on his own chest, coughs heartily, and then barrels through. “Rimmer, I want a shag.”

Rimmer’s eyebrows lift. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard.”

“You want a shag,” Rimmer says, and he says the word like it’s a foreign word he’s stumbling over, slow and deliberate. “Right. And what exactly do you want me involved for, then? Or have you forgotten that I’m missing some fairly essential parts — namely, all of them.”

Lister feels stupid and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He swings his arms at his sides, goes to put his hands in pockets, gives up, scratches the back of his head. “Hey, don’t shoot me down yet, alright—I have an idea.”

“I’m listening.”

Taking a deep breath, Lister crosses their sleeping quarters to the wall alongside the bunk, and he lowers himself to sit on the floor. He shifts his weight to get comfortable, legs spread, back against the wall, and drums his hands on his thighs. “Okay. So—come here.”

Rimmer stares at him, suspicious and uncomprehending. “Why?”

“Will you just trust me?”

“No,” Rimmer says, but he does walk over, carefully stepping over Lister’s feet even though he could just step straight through them. Then he pauses, eyeing Lister with the same suspicion. “Now what?”

“Sit down,” Lister says, and he pats the space in front of him, in the V of his legs. “Come here.”

Rimmer does as he’s told, slow and uncertain. He looks back over his shoulder at Lister once he’s sat on the floor, and Lister watches the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows nervously.

“Face forwards.”

“I don’t—”

“Rimmer.”

He faces the front. Lister can hear his breathing, just slightly out of pace with Lister’s own. Slightly faster.

Lister says, “Lock door.”

There is the dull clunk of the door sealing tight.

“Lights.”

The room goes black. Except for the emergency lighting strip and the faint glow that Rimmer’s hologram emits, they are in the dark. This close, Lister can hear Rimmer’s light-bee quietly humming.

“Put one arm behind your back,” Lister says, into Rimmer’s ear, or as near it as he can without running into his hologram. “Right up against your arse. Make, like, a fist on the floor.”

“What?”

“Just do it.”

Rimmer shifts slightly. “Done. God, this is uncomfortable.”

“That’s—” Lister clears his throat. “That’s me. Behind you.”

Rimmer goes quiet.

“And…” Lister places a hand between his spread thighs, the heel of his hand right up against the seam of his trousers, close enough that he can feel the pressure against his dick. “This is you.”

“So just to be clear,” Rimmer says, his voice wobbly, “your bright idea is us continuing to wank ourselves off separately, but just—pretending?”

“If you don’t want to, we can just—”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then… yeah. That’s my idea, yeah.”

There is a long silence between them. Lister can hear Rimmer breathing. With his arm still twisted beneath behind his back, the line of his shoulders is tight, tense, and Lister can read his uncertainty clear as daylight. For once—what Lister reckons must be the first time ever—his leg isn’t jiggling. He’s totally still, and he swallows before he says, “Alright.”

“Yeah?

“Yes, alright.”

“Can I loosen your tie?” Lister asks.

“Yes,” Rimmer says, and then doesn’t move.

Lister rolls his eyes. “Rimmer, you have to actually—”

“Oh—right. Sorry.” There is the sound of Rimmer fumbling with his tie, the slippery fabric sound of it being pulled through.

“And top button.”

“Hang on, hang on.”

Lister waits while Rimmer gets his shirt unbuttoned to the base of his throat. “Can you touch your throat for me?”

“My throat?” Rimmer echoes. “What for?”

Lister sighs, long-suffering. “Jesus, you really have no concept of foreplay, do you?”

“Well, it’s hardly the interesting bit, is it?”

“Smegging hell,” Lister mutters. “Rimmer, we can’t do the interesting bit, so you’re gonna have to get used to this.”

He doesn’t mean to imply that this might become a regular occurrence, that there’s any long-term future in them wanking each other off in the dark. Although, to be honest, it should have been obvious—last two people in the universe, and all that. This is probably the most normal thing going on on-board _Red Dwarf._

“Alright,” Rimmer says. He shifts uncomfortably. “I’m—I’m doing it. Just the once?”

“Keep your fingers there for a bit. I’m getting some of my kit off.”

Lister leans back to shrug out of his leather jacket. The air in their sleeping quarters is surprisingly cold, when he’s sat down on the floor, but he pushes through it.

“More buttons,” Lister says. “Slow.”

“Can you hurry up?” Rimmer asks.

“No. Slowly, or smeg off.”

Rimmer huffs, but does as he’s told.

“Touch your chest—down to your stomach. Down to your belt, I mean.”

Rimmer’s breath hitches.

“Get your belt undone.”

Clink of metal.

“Grab a handful for me.”

“What? No!”

“Rimmer, it’s me. It’s me doing it.”

“But it isn’t. It’s me, and I feel daft.”

“Please.”

Quiet for a moment. Then a tiny grunt. “Happy?”

“Close enough.”

“No pleasing some people—”

“Shut up, Rimmer.” Lister takes a deep breath. “Get unzipped, then. Get—yeah.”

More fumbling in the dark. The teeth of a zipper being pulled open, then Rimmer’s breath hiccups again. The sound of skin on skin. Lister shuts his eyes, tries to remember the weight of Rimmer’s dick in his hand.

Rimmer swallows. “Is this,” he says, and his voice is slightly hoarse. “Is this you, or me? Doing this?”

Lister tips his head to lean against the wall at his back. “Me,” he says. “That’s me.”

“Oh.” Rimmer doesn’t say any more than that, but it’s enough—less of a word, more a soft noise. Lister wants to push his face into the crease of Rimmer’s shoulder, but he holds himself back, pretends it’s because he wants to give Rimmer some space. He’s not touching him properly because they’re taking it slow. He could touch him if he wanted to—they’re just taking it slow.

“So… what am I doing?”

Lister opens his eyes. “I dunno,” he admits.

“Can I touch you?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Can I—put my hand on your thigh?”

Lister does as he’s told. “Yeah.” His hand feels warm and heavy. He knows it’s not Rimmer, but with his eyes shut, he can pretend. “And I’m still touching you, yeah?”

“Yes. My stomach and—” Rimmer trails off. He clears his throat. “And the other bits.”

Lister rolls his eyes. “I love it when you talk dirty, Rimmer.”

“Oh, smeg off.”

“Maybe in a minute.” Lister curls the hand—Rimmer’s hand—on his thigh into a fist, scratching over the coarse material of his trousers. “Are you going slow, still?”

“You are, you mean.”

Lister mentally kicks himself. “Yeah. I’m still going slow. And I’m getting my other hand up under your shirt.”

Rimmer moves awkwardly. “One moment,” he says. “Just—you forgot to get the braces off first, so—”

“Oh—forgot about those. Got ‘em?”

“Just about. Hand under shirt, then. And—erm, what are you doing under there?”

Lister’s mouth is dry. “I—I’m just.” He feels like his voice is sticking in his throat. “Touching you. Wherever I can.”

Rimmer is silent, but Lister can hear his breathing, slow and unsteady. He can hear the dry drag of Rimmer’s palms across his skin, the whisper of his fingertips. He tries to remember whether he has ever actually got his hands on Rimmer before.

“Your throat,” Lister says, and he hears Rimmer release the softest sigh, barely audible. Without meaning to, Lister’s hips tilt forwards, pressing into his own wrist where he has it up between his thighs. There is no friction, just a fleeting moment of contact, but Lister pretends as hard as he can that the pressure he can feel is Rimmer, his arse up against Lister’s dick. “Your mouth.”

“Are you—”

“Yeah.”

Lister breathes deeply through his nose, tries to concentrate on the tiny sounds that Rimmer makes, tries to drown out the hum of his light-bee at the core of him. He pitches his hips forwards, just barely, just enough that there’s physical contact. That’s Rimmer, there. Lister is half-hard and Rimmer can feel it against his arse when Lister shifts against him.

“I want,” Lister says, and then doubts himself. He almost chickens out, but he can hear Rimmer become still, and he pushes through. “I wanna get my fingers in your mouth. Is that—can I do that?”

For a long moment, Rimmer says nothing.

Lister adds hastily, to remind him, “It’s me doing it. You’d be—it would my fingers.”

Rimmer’s voice, when he finally speaks, is very quiet. “Alright.”

A pause, a slow breath, and then the wet sound of it. With his eyes shut, Lister tries to get back to the days before the accident, when he could watch the shape of Rimmer’s lips around his knuckles, and Lister’s dick pulses against the inner seam of his trousers. He hisses between his teeth, digs the heel of his hand into his dick, but the brief friction lights sparks along his spine, curls heat low in his stomach.

He wants to get more of his clothes off, but he doesn’t know how to do it without totally disrupting whatever the hell it is that he and Rimmer are playing at now, and so he just sits, legs spread, in way too many clothes, heat fizzing beneath his skin.

With a wet pop, Rimmer’s fingers come out of his mouth, and he says, “This is stupid,” but his voice doesn’t match the words. His voice is shaky, cracked open. “This feels—”

“I’m behind you,” Lister says, words spilling over themselves in a rush. “I’m—can you feel that?”

Rimmer shifts. “I can’t,” he says, voice low, almost embarrassed. “I mean—not all at once. If you’re touching me and—if I’ve got your fingers, I can’t—”

“Just me and your mouth, then.”

“I don’t know if—”

“Please, Rimmer. Just trust me.”

There is, again, the sound—wetter this time, the slide of Rimmer’s fingers into his mouth easier and readier, and Lister can picture it with his eyes shut so clearly that it hurts. The way Rimmer’s bottom lip might catch against his own skin, the slick heat of his tongue. Lister is breathing ragged, his trousers painfully tight, his zipper digging in. He doesn’t want to wank himself off yet, though—he’s still just pushing his dick against Rimmer’s back, wanting Rimmer to feel it, so he knows that he wants him even if he can’t say it.

“You feel that?” Lister manages, and Rimmer makes a low sound in the back of his throat, muffled around his fingers, but it ignites something in Lister and his hips jerk forwards on blind instinct. The moment he grinds into his own hand is a relief so great it makes him gasp, and he can hear a rough noise in it that he didn’t mean to let out. “Yeah?”

Rimmer’s breath catches, a groan caught somewhere in his chest, and Lister wants so badly to see him come apart. Eyes shut, he can pretend that he can feel the long planes of Rimmer’s body rocking backwards into him, that if he tipped his head forwards, he could bury his face in the curls at the back of Rimmer’s neck, that he could kiss him there, suck at the pulse point at his shoulder. He could do that—he could, if he wanted to, but he’s trying not to touch him.

Lister gets his free hand, presses his knuckles against his inner thigh—that’s Rimmer’s leg against his own—except no, because Rimmer’s tall, gangly, that wouldn’t feel like that—and he flattens his palm against his own hip, digs his fingers in. He feels like he vaguely recalls the bony jut of Rimmer’s hipbones under his palms, can’t be sure he’s not just imagining that, but in his head, this is Rimmer’s hip, this is Rimmer’s stomach with the muscles jumping under his fingertips as he tries to hold back from fucking forwards against Rimmer’s arse.

“Yeah,” Lister says again, because his brain isn’t working and he doesn’t remember how to have sex that isn’t totally dysfunctional. “Yeah. Alright?”

A gasp, the wet slide again, and then Rimmer’s voice, totally wrecked now. “Lister,” he rasps. “Lister, if you don’t do something—if you don’t touch me, I’m going to—”

Want coils breathlessly tighter in Lister’s gut, and God, he wants to touch Rimmer properly, to get his hands on him and feel him shake apart. “Hang on, hang on, I’ve got you.”

“Just please get on with it.”

“I’m here.” Lister fumbles desperately for his button and fly. “Wait—Rimmer, wait, I want to do it with you,” he says, and he isn’t even embarrassed when he gets his hand in his boxers and finds himself already wet, leaking like he’s fifteen again and so totally, mindlessly, desperately turned on that he can barely last. “Christ—yeah, okay. I’m—I’m touching you. I’m pulling you off. I got you.”

The breathless whine that Rimmer makes is all at once the stupidest and the hottest thing Lister’s ever heard, rivalled closely by the quick, wet sound of Rimmer jacking himself. Lister feels too big for his skin, like he’s going to burst, and when he joins Rimmer, touching himself without any further romantic fannying around, just fast and firm and urgent, he can hear a low noise in the back of his own throat that he feels like he has absolutely zero control over. He wants to come so badly it hurts now, and he wants a body, warm and wanting and eager, against his own. He’s holding back from Rimmer because—because—he could touch him if he wanted to. He’s right there. He’s so close. Lister opens his eyes for the first time in several minutes, and in the dim white light that Rimmer’s light-bee projects even in the dark, he can see the red flush climbing Rimmer’s throat, and he wants to get his mouth there. Just for a second, he really believes he could.

“Lister,” Rimmer gasps. “I’m—I’m—”

“You’re okay, I got you,” Lister says, and his fingers dig in tighter to his own hip, tight enough to hurt, as though Rimmer might feel it if Lister’s fingernails bite through to blood. “It’s me. That’s me, and I got—”

Rimmer comes, with a grunt and a gasp, and Lister isn’t far behind, pushing into his fist hard and fast until the heat crests within him and it’s over.

He lets out a long, shuddering noise as he spills onto the floor, and as he slowly comes down, in the dark, it hits him that technically, he has probably just… fired one off _through_ Rimmer. Christ.

Lister wipes his sweaty, sticky hand on the leg of his trousers, and then drops his head back against the metal wall with a dull thunk.

He takes a moment just to catch his breath, and then he drums his fist against the floor beside his thigh. “You alright?” he asks.

Rimmer clears his throat. “Yes, I’m alright,” he says, in the most disingenuously polite voice that Lister has ever heard him use.

“Bollocks,” Lister says.

“What’s bollocks?”

“You. What’s that, your customer service voice? Your up-the-ziggurat brown-nosing voice? Get real.”

“Well, what do you want me to say?” Rimmer says, and his voice falls again into that stupid impersonation he does when he wants to deflect. “ _Thank you, dearest David, for making me suck myself to completion like a horny child. So glad I could trick myself into thinking I was a real person for ten minutes—ta very much, must do this again sometime_.”

Lister drags a hand over his face. “You make it sound stupid.”

“It _was_ stupid.”

“Alright, wank yourself off alone, next time,” Lister says. “No-one’s putting a gun to your head to say you’ve absolutely got to pretend we can fuck each other. Piss off, then.”

“You piss off. I was here first.”

They fall into silence, and neither of them move. Neither of them go to turn the lights on, or return to life as normal. Lister doesn’t even make the move to do up his trousers. Bickering aside, they’re still in the bubble of the dark and the fantasy, and Lister’s got to admit it’s comfortable there. To tell the truth, he likes it better than the real world outside, so he isn’t going anywhere just yet.

Rimmer takes a deep breath, and then says nothing. Lister doesn’t prompt him, doesn’t ask, and so it’s a minute or two more before Rimmer works up the nerve to say it.

He clears his throat. He rubs his palms nervously against his thighs. His right foot is jiggling. He says, slow and strained, “It wasn’t good but it was close.”

Smegging hell. Lister’s glad he wasn’t waiting for anything momentous. “Thanks a lot.”

“No, I just mean—” Rimmer has to psych himself up again. He swallows. “I mean that… it fooled me. Now and then, even just for a bit.” His voice is smaller than Lister expected, softer than Lister knew was possible. “Which is enough.”

“Wish I could do more,” Lister says with a resigned shrug.

“Well, buy me dinner first.”

Lister snorts. “As if. You’d crawl into bed for a freshly sharpened pencil.”

“I’m sorry, what was that, Mr. Naan Bread?”

It’s stupid, utterly stupid, but somehow it catches Lister off-guard and he laughs like a drain. Laughs til it hurts and it gets a low, pleased chuckle out of Rimmer, and neither of them have moved yet. Rimmer’s body is still cradled against Lister’s, folded together. If they could touch, that is.

When Lister pulls himself together, he starts rearranging his clothes as well, and he shrugs back into his jacket, saying, “Lights,” at the same moment that Rimmer turns around.

“Rimmer,” Lister says, and then he loses track of whatever he was saying because Rimmer’s not yet visualised his pristine uniform and Lister is feeling a touch hot under the collar all over again at the sight of him rumpled and unkempt. He can see Rimmer’s collarbone where his shirt is open at the throat, and he aches, ridiculously, to put his mouth there. To kiss him til he’s got nothing smart to say. Then again—pot, kettle kind of situation—because he makes the mistake of looking at Rimmer’s pink, wet mouth, and he is totally incapable of any kind of intelligent thought.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Rimmer says, climbing to his feet, half-dressed and more smug than he has any right to be, with all the elegance and grace of a lame racehorse limping to the finish line, and Lister wonders what the smeg just happened.

***


	4. Green Tunic

**IV**

An alarm is going off, and Lister, Rimmer, and the Cat are moving at a half-hearted ambling run down the corridor to see what the emergency is. “Something on the long-range scanner,” Holly explains, as they come around the bend.

“Can you be just a touch more specific?” Rimmer asks.

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Holly says. “It’s the scanner in the drive room.”

Lister rolls his eyes, but by that point they’ve arrived, and Lister can see for himself that there are flashing orange bulbs, little red lights, and something coming up on the main screen. Lister drops into the Captain’s chair, and Rimmer, annoyed as ever that he can’t sit in it, hovers over his shoulder like a big, anxious house-fly, only with slightly worse manners. 

“Where am I looking, Hol?”

“At the scanner, probably,” Rimmer chips in, and Lister ignores him.

“Fifth quadrant, top left,” Holly says calmly. “See that blob? I reckon that’s gonna want to eat us.”

Lister squints at the screen. “What is it?”

“Don’t know yet. But weird blobs showing up on the scanner always seem to want to eat us. Just thought I’d get ahead of the game.”

The Cat tilts his head over. “You gotta admit, she’s got a point.”

Lister sighs. “Is there any way we can find out what it is? Scan for life-forms or anything?”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Rimmer says. “Technically, scans pick up Lister as a humanoid life-form, and look at him.”

Lister flips him off. 

“It’s a ship,” Holly says. “Must’ve had some kind of cloaking device, to pop out of nowhere like that. Too far off to scan at the minute, but they’re heading right for us. Their present course sets them to intercept us in about fifteen minutes.”

“Can we communicate with them at all?” Rimmer asks. “Get a visual—anything?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Perhaps there’s a perfectly rational, peaceful explanation for this behaviour,” Kryten says. “Perhaps they mean us no harm.”

Lister gives him a flat look. “Yeah, because so far deep space has been crawling with things desperate to be our mates.”

Rimmer has started wringing his hands. “I don’t like the look of this. What if they’re some kind of weird space pirates? What if they’re cannibals?”

“Don’t say that,” the Cat cries. “I’m the only one soft enough to chew!”

“That’s true,” Lister says. “A rottweiler had a go at my arm once—broke four of its teeth.”

“Hang on—they’re coming in to dock. Ship closing,” Holly narrates. “Should I let them on board?”

They exchange uncertain glances, Kryten worried, Rimmer twisting his hands together as he works himself gradually up into a helpless rage.

“Alright,” Lister says. “Hol, let ‘em aboard.”

While Holly opens an airlock for them, Rimmer, Lister, Kryten, and the Cat head down to meet them, and stand awkwardly early in the corridor as they wait for the airlock to repressurise. 

“This sort of thing always goes really well for us,” Lister says. He glances over at Rimmer. “What do you reckon? What gets cocked up first?”

“We can do it,” Rimmer says. “We’re not all imbeciles. I think we’ve got at least twenty brain-cells between us—what could go wrong?”

“I bet it’s goalpost-head who embarrasses us,” the Cat says decisively.

“When am I ever the problem?” Rimmer protests. “I always demonstrate exemplary manners and decorum.”

“What about that time you told Captain Hollister to smeg off and go plough his mother?” Lister asks.

Rimmer sniffs disdainfully. “That was different. He was being a cock.”

The door slides open with a hiss, and the crew of the _Red Dwarf_ are all polite smiles, as in walks what is absolutely, undoubtedly, an alien. Four pincer-like legs with an odd, slow, scuttling walk, smooth grey skin, and a vaguely humanoid torso plopped on top, with a mostly shapeless head, the blank sheen interrupted only by three tentacles and about a quarter of a million eyes.

At Lister’s side, Rimmer sucks in a gasp. “Aliens.”

Lister bites back a grin. Without turning his head, he whispers, “Behave.”

The alien walks slowly, sidestepping like a crab, its body swivelling as it moves, and Rimmer starts vibrating with excitement. He makes a funny, jerking movement, as if to rush forwards, until Lister hisses at him to stay put. Rimmer manages to restrain himself for approximately six more seconds, and then he’s gone.

He rushes up to the alien, drops into his lowest, weaseliest, floor-scraping bow, and begins grandly, “My name is Arnold J. Rimmer, Acting Senior Officer Executive Commanding Technician In Charge of _Red Dwarf_.” He straightens up, chin lifted high. “Now, let me start off by saying how wonderful it is to meet you, and what an honour that you would come aboard our lowly mining vessel. I am a massive fan of your work, think you’re just absolutely marvellous, and I would like to be the first to enquire as to whether you lay eggs or eat people?”

Lister closes his eyes in agony.

The pincers click ominously, and the alien says nothing. It’s hard to gauge whether that’s because the alien doesn’t speak English or just because it’s totally baffled by Rimmer. Lister knows the feeling.

At last, in a slow, measured voice, the alien speaks. Lister’s unsure where the sound is coming from, given that they have no mouth, but the sound, although gurgly, is relatively clear. “You are… fan of our… work?”

“Of course,” Rimmer says, voice oozing slimy enthusiasm. “Obviously. I mean—I don’t know the exact nature of your work, since—well. We’ve only just met. But I am very excited to learn more about you and your—your customs, and to potentially, maybe, get an autograph of yours if you have the time, if it’s not a terrible inconvenience, but—yes, I am a massive, massive fan of your work. What, erm—” He hesitates. “What is it that you do, exactly?”

“We… capture… inferior life-forms… for sale into… slavery…”

Rimmer’s face twitches.

Kryten says, “Oh dear.”

“Good one, Rimmer,” Lister says.

Above them, on the screen, Holly says, “Alright, so not planning to eat us, but I was close, weren’t I?”

“We are… not here… to make war,” the alien goes on, seeming exhausted by every word, the sentence dragging and dragging. “We need… fuel… for our… triethyl... borane… prop… ulsion…”

“If there’s a short version, go for that,” the Cat says.

“Triethyl—yes. We have lots of that,” Rimmer says. “Oodles, I think. Masses. You’re quite welcome to it.”

“Hang on a second,” Lister interrupts. “Just—hang on. Acting Big Man Officer Whatever, can we have a word?”

Rimmer swivels on the heels, looking murderous. “What?”

Lister jerks his head, and Rimmer follows him into the corner, after a lot of bowing and apologising and _be right back, make yourself comfortable, of course, right away, anything you want._ The Cat follows, ducking behind Rimmer in a way that suggests he just doesn’t want to be left alone with the alien, and then Kryten comes after them.

“What’s the problem now?” Rimmer hisses as soon as they’re out of earshot.

“We’re not helping them refuel,” Lister says. “They’re weird alien slavers.”

Rimmer stares at him. “So?”

“So—Jesus, Rimmer, you’ve got the moral backbone of a rice pudding. We’re not helping these lunatics.”

“But think—if we help them, they might help us!”

“Whatever kind of help they can offer us, we don’t want it,” Lister says firmly.

“Hey, hey, hey,” the Cat interrupts. “Let’s not get hasty, now. There might be something they can do about your face.”

Lister frowns. “What about my face?”

The Cat grimaces. “Have you seen it, recently?”

“Forget Lister’s face—they could give me my body back,” Rimmer interrupts. “I could be a real person again. I could eat, touch, feel!”

Lister looks at him. He hadn’t thought of that, but of course it’s Rimmer’s number one priority. Mostly, Lister likes to think he’s got an unshakable moral compass, but he’d be lying if he said that at that moment, the needle didn’t waver. He doesn’t mean to look at Rimmer’s mouth—it just sort of happens—and then he drags both hands down over his face to snap himself out of it. “No,” he says. “It’s not worth it.”

“Easy for you to say, Mr. Opposable Thumbs,” Rimmer snaps.

“I don’t care—we’re not helping them.”

“I’m afraid I’m with Mr. Lister on this one,” Kryten says. “At the moment, we have a distinct advantage over our guests by virtue of having all _Red Dwarf_ ’s power at our disposal, while they are incapacitated by their fuel leak. However, once we assist them, we lose that advantage, and there is nothing to stop them from attacking us.”

“The lack of trust here is astounding,” Rimmer says. “Who’s to say they even want to attack us?”

Lister leans back, away from the group, to turn his head towards the aliens waiting on the other side of the room. “Hey—quick question,” he calls. “When you said you’re into selling, uh, _inferior life-forms_ into slavery, what sort of life-forms are you talking about there?”

“Primarily… humans… and humanoids…” the lead alien replies.

Lister turns back to the group, eyebrows arched.

The Cat takes over. “And what are your thoughts on cats?”

“What… is… a cat?” the alien warbles. “Is it… a meal?”

The Cat swivels back, wide-eyed. “These guys are monsters!”

“Oh, alright, alright,” Rimmer mutters. “Point taken.”

“So we’re in accords?” Kryten checks, glancing between them.

“Abso-smeggin’-lutely.” Lister wheels around and heads back to the waiting aliens. “Heads-up—it’s a no from us.”

The lead alien is silent for a moment, tentacles curling, pincer clicking slowly as though it is taking a moment to process and understand. “A… no?” it repeats. “No—you… will not… provide us… with the tri…ethyl…borane… propulsion engine… fuel… components… that we…”

“Oh my God, please try to be more concise,” Rimmer says.

The Cat leans across to Lister. “You think that when they die, their life flashes before their eyes at normal speed?”

For a moment, the alien speaks to its crewmates in a strange, purring compilation of clicks and low, humming notes. Their pincers snap several times in quick succession, in a gesture that Lister doesn’t understand but makes him want to jump back well out of range. The alien then returns to English to say, “We require… the fuel… with the utmost… urgency. You must… help us…”

“Sorry, kids—no can do,” Lister says, and he plants his feet squarely apart, arms folded across his chest, and stares the slimy wankers down like he’s spoiling for a fight. “See, here on _Red Dwarf_ , we have a strict rule about not helping genocidal maniacs, and you know me, I’m a stickler for the rules. So off you pop—before things start getting ugly.”

“Is this … a threat, miniscule… human?” the lead alien says, slow and uncomprehending.

Lister laughs. “Nah, it’s a warning,” he says, and he steps forwards with a slow, rolling gait, right up into the alien’s face. “Me telling you that if you’ve got ten seconds flat to get off our ship before I start breaking tentacles—that’s a threat.”

“Get off your ship?” the alien repeats. “And go where?”

“As if I care where you end up. Away from here. Away from us, away from everyone.” Lister makes a show of shaking back his sleeve to look at his wrist. He isn’t even wearing a watch. “Seven seconds.”

“But—we’ll die.”

“My heart bleeds for you, really, it does. Five.”

“But our cargo will die with us!” the alien says.

“Three, two, one,” Rimmer chants gleefully. “Oh—look at that. Such a shame. Right—”

“Cargo?” Lister repeats. “What cargo?”

“We are … slavers,” the alien explains. “We have… forty-three trophies … on board our ship who are …. as dependent on us … for their survival as we are … on you for ours.”

“What a terrible pity,” Rimmer goes. “Well, it’s been lovely, but…”

“Shut up, Rimmer,” Lister says, holding up a hand between them. “What do you mean, trophies? Humans?”

The alien nods. “Forty-three of them.”

Lister turns to look at the others. He is sure that how he feels is scrawled across his face as clear as anything—hope _._ It’s not the end of civilisation as he knows it. He’s not the last human being in the universe. There are others and they’re alive. His brain is spinning faster than he can keep up, trying to formulate a plan. “Show me,” he says, at last. “I want to see.”

“We will show… only two of you,” the alien says. “Your commanding… officers.”

“Alright,” Lister says with a nod. “I’ll go along, take a look, and then we’ll talk.”

Rimmer raises his hands. “Erm, hang on a minute, Listy. You aren’t a commanding officer.”

The alien swivels to face Lister, pincers clicking in a slow, syncopated rhythm. “Are you… the captain of your vessel?” it asks.

“Captain?” Rimmer snorts derisively. “He isn’t in charge of anything. We don’t even trust him to be in charge of his own cutlery.”

“So who is… in command, then?”

Rimmer’s face shifts into wonder and delight. “That would be me.”

“Oh, not if your life depended on it,” Lister says, pointing a finger. “No way. Not happening, never.”

“Lister, I’m your superior. You can’t just—”

“He is not in charge,” Lister tells the aliens. “To be honest, I’m not sure anyone is in charge, but it’s definitely not him.”

The alien’s head swings back and forth between them with a low squelching sound that Lister would otherwise probably have associated with a frog being sat on. Hundreds of tiny, beetle-black eyes blink alternately. “Both of you, then,” the alien says. “Come with us. We will show you… our cargo… and then… in return, you will… provide us… with the fuel boost… we require?”

Lister grimaces. “I said we’ll talk. No promises. No funny business.”

The alien’s tentacles curl reflexively at the tips, and Lister gets the impression it’s thinking about it. “Very well,” it says, finally, not sounding terribly pleased about it, but then again, Lister doesn’t reckon that anyone is massively enjoying this encounter.

Lister exchanges a look with Rimmer, pulling a face intended to communicate, _well, what’s the worst that could happen?_ and they obediently follow.

Then Lister jerks his head back towards the body of _Red Dwarf._ “Kryten, Cat, you hang back, keep an eye on the rest of them. If I’m not back in ten minutes—” he pauses, considering. “Tell Holly to scan the ship and find me.”

Two aliens stay with Kryten and the Cat in the corridor, and Lister leaves Kryten offering politely to escort them to the nearby canteen to offer them some refreshment, and on that note, with walkie-talkies strapped to their waists, he and Rimmer set out to tour the cargo decks of the aliens’ ship.

The leader of the alien group brings them back through the docking port and onto a much smaller ship. Even just from a passing glance, it’s obvious that it is far more technologically advanced than _Red Dwarf_ , although everything about it looks in pretty bad nick.

As they are led deeper and deeper, Lister frowns, turning constantly while he walks to look back at the passing decor. It’s weird, but not in the sort of way that he’d expect in an alien ship to be weird. In fact, everything that Lister has seen so far looks inexplicably… human.

As they walk, Lister reaches out to drift his fingertips along the steely walls, and when his fingers bump over a hard edge, he looks over to see a dusty ‘no smoking sign’. It’s odd, to say the least, especially considering that the aliens don’t have any of the means or tools necessary to building up a chain-smoking habit—such as, say, hands or a mouth. A frown creases up Lister’s brow, and then his attention is caught by other oddities—all the stairs, for example, for aliens whose bodies surely aren’t convenient to use them; the hand-scan door panels, just like the ones on _Red Dwarf_ , for aliens with pincers and tentacles.

It doesn’t add up. Lister opens his mouth to ask the alien leading them through the ship, but thinks better of it; instead, he tests the radio to ask what Kryten and the Cat think. However, as he tries to find their signal, he only reaches hissing static.

The sound of the radio fizzing attracts the alien’s attention up ahead and without turning around, the alien’s head swivels one-eighty degrees.

“Jesus,” Lister exclaims, nearly dropping the walkie-talkie. “Didn’t know you could do that. What—”

“What… are you doing…?”

“Just wanted to check in with Kryten,” Lister says, and he wiggles the receiver. “Think I might have left the oven on.”

“Don’t be rude, Lister,” Rimmer hisses. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I’m not going to let you cock it up just because—”

At that moment, there is the perfect distraction when Lister realises that they have stopped in front of the cargo bay doors, which now slide open with a low whoosh. Both Rimmer and Lister fall instantly silent, staring.

Lister doesn’t know what he was expecting, but what’s waiting within is row after row of humans on their knees, chained and manacled. People. Real, alive people, here, docked alongside _Red Dwarf_ in the heart of deep space, and Lister has no idea what to say. He hasn’t seen another human being in nearly five years, although technically he knows that the time lapsed is a couple million years higher, and he supposes that gradually he has become so desensitised to the idea of being last vestige of a dead species that now, faced with forty-odd other people—faced with the knowledge that he isn’t alone—he doesn’t know what to do. 

After several long moments of silence, the alien nearest Lister says, “Are you… satisfied… with the… condition of… our cargo?”

Finally, the radio signal crackles back to life, and Kryten’s voice comes haltingly through, muffled by static.

“Sir?” Kryten’s voice comes across, raspy and broken. “Sir, what is it?”

“People, Kryten. There’s _people_.”

“People? Human beings, sir? Are you quite sure?” 

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“What evolutionary changes have they undergone since you last saw them, Mr. Lister, sir?”

“What do you mean?”

One of the aliens come up to Lister. “Please…” it says. “We would ask… that you avoid… use of the radio… on board… our vessel. Our fuel is… highly reactive… and we… don’t wish… to set off any… dangerous chemical reactions…”

Without hesitating, Lister switches off the radio. He’s not doing anything to put the last forty-three humans in the universe into danger. He turns to the alien and says, “Okay, let’s talk.”

“Are you… willing… to give us… the fuel… we require?”

“You hand over your cargo to us, and then we’re golden. You can have all the fuel you want.”

“We cannot… give you… our cargo.”

“Then there’s no deal. You can piss off and die.”

The pincer snaps. “Then… all our cargo… will die. Or… we can give you… half… and you let us… leave with… the remainder.”

Lister hesitates.

“Surely half in slavery is better than all of them dead,” Rimmer says.

“Shut up,” Lister says. “I’m not taking ethical advice from a man who invented an alter-ego so he could get free grub from the local soup kitchen.” He turns back to the aliens. “I want to speak to them.”

“Naturally… we cannot… allow this....”

“Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”

“He’s been alone in deep space for three million years—by this point, he won’t take long,” Rimmer chips in.

“Stop being disgusting,” Lister tells him. Then, to the aliens again: “Five minutes.”

“Very… well,” the lead alien says, at last. “No more.”

Lister vaults the barrier between him and the cargo deck, dropping three feet to the ground below, and hastens to the front row of the humans while Rimmer hurries down the length of the ramp.

“Hey,” Lister says, voice low. “Do you speak English?”

The nearest, a woman, nods shakily. “I do,” she says. “Have they captured you, too?”

“No, you’re docked alongside our ship at the minute,” Lister explains, as Rimmer finally catches up, huffing and puffing. “We’re here to help.”

“Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Rimmer says, throwing a hand out as he tries to catch his breath. “We haven’t decided what we’re doing yet.”

“We are not leaving them here,” Lister hisses. “No way.”

“Will you stop thinking with your trousers for a moment and listen to—”

“You’re just a monumental smeg-stain, I know, you can’t help it. But—”

“I am not—”

“Let us help you,” the woman interrupts in an urgent whisper.

Both Lister and Rimmer turn to look blankly at her.

“Some of us used to live on this ship before they captured it,” the woman says. “We know the ship well, we know where the weapons are kept, and we know their weaknesses.”

“So you’ll help us to help you?” Rimmer asks.

“We’d love for you to help us to help you to... help us,” Lister says, frowning as he turns it over in his head.

Rimmer cocks an eyebrow at Lister. “Do you need any help with that?”

Lister flaps a hand at him. “Forget it. Yes.”

“How many crew do you have?” the woman asks.

“Four.”

She carries on looking at him expectantly. After a moment, when it becomes clear that Lister is not going to say anything else, she prompts, “Four…?”

“Yeah, four. That’s it.”

Her eyes move past Lister, just for a second, and she pulls a strange face to someone behind him. If Lister had to put words to that expression, he would’ve described it as being something like, _smeg it._

“Well, blow this, then,” she says, and she yanks both hands instantly and easily out of her manacles.

Rimmer blinks, startled. “Why couldn’t you just do that earlier?” he asks idiotically, and then she pulls a small remote device out of her pocket, and with one press of a button, the projection of Rimmer flashes hot, eye-searing white and vanishes.

“Hey!” Lister shouts. “What the smeg have you done—”

Rimmer’s light-bee hangs uselessly in the air for a moment, fans slowing, before it falls, and Lister lunges to catch it. He bangs his elbow hard on the floor as he intercepts Rimmer’s bee inches from the floor, and the stinging pain half-distracts him from the crackle that comes through crackling radio static.

“Sir, something is wrong!” Kryten’s voice is frantic and distorted. “The aliens—well, that’s it! They’re not aliens! They’re mechanoids, which means—”

Whatever it means, Lister doesn’t get to find out, because at that moment, he feels the impact of the butt of a bazakooid colliding hard with the back of his skull, and then there is only darkness.

***

When he comes around, Lister finds himself lashed to a chair, bound and held upright by lengths of thick grey cables. A significant portion of the cabling across his chest has been stripped back to expose the bristling copper wire, and it is then that Lister realises he is also shivering cold and wet from head to toe. All in all, it isn’t looking good.

Lister’s head is pounding, his vision swimming, but slowly as everything comes into focus, he sees that Rimmer is off to one side, similarly bound although for him it’s by the sparking length of a deadly-looking holowhip.

“Urgh,” Lister says, swallowing in spite of his dry mouth and tight throat. He’s alright. He’s had hangovers worse than this, although admittedly not many. When he opens his mouth to speak, his voice is still a croak. “Rimmer,” he says, first. “You alright?”

“Morning, Listy,” Rimmer says, his voice pitched at that terrifyingly calm, even timbre that he reserves for when he is absolutely bricking it, and Lister’s stomach sinks. “I don’t wish to cause you any alarm, but unfortunately, we’ve been taken hostage, and these maniacs—who incidentally, are not aliens, as we had all excitedly hoped, but are psychotic simulant pirates—are lined up to send three-hundred volts of electricity coursing through your nipples post-haste. But on the bright side, they don’t have anything on-hand to interfere with my nipples, so I’m alright.”

“Piss off, Rimmer,” Lister says, and Rimmer gives an affronted huff, but he does at least shut up.

“Are you ready to begin negotiations?” a cold voice asks, and Lister lifts his head to see the female slave now fully clothed, fully armoured, and more importantly, holding the plug at the end of Lister’s loops of grey cabling just slightly away from a wall socket. Not far away enough.

“So, freedom clearly doesn’t suit you,” Lister says. “Now, call me overly sensitive, but I feel like I’m way, way better at negotiating when I’m not using an electrical current as a push-up bra.”

“We have no wish to hurt you,” the simulant says. “It would be entertaining, yes, but we have no need of it. We are willing to forgo this entertainment tonight. We have an ongoing game of Boggle that I believe would be almost equally stimulating.”

“Made-up words certainly help,” the other simulant mutters.

The first simulant turns a slow, deadly look on the other. “What was that?”

With an eye-roll, the second simulant shifts from one foot to the other. “Nothing. Forget it.”

“No. Clearly, you have something to say—”

“I just said, made-up words certainly help.”

“I wasn’t using made-up words,” the first simulant snaps.

“Of course not, of course not. But someone wouldn’t have a forty-point lead if they hadn’t thrown in _eloquacious_ out of nowhere—”

“I don’t know why you’re being so difficult about this. It is a word, I’ve heard people say it—”

“You’ve heard Tim say it,” the second says shortly. “Hardly a convincing figure of authority to lend credence to your—”

“Not just Tim, actually—”

“Oh? Then who?”

The first simulant turns to Lister and Rimmer with a scowl. “Right, let’s ask—is _eloquacious_ a word?”

Lister turns to Rimmer over his shoulder as best he can, expectant. Rimmer looks delighted to be consulted, and he leans forwards in his seat as best he can with a condescending smile. “Afraid not,” he says. “Eloquent? Yes. Loquacious? _Absolument_. Tragically, however—”

“Who died and made you the leading authority on Boggle scores?” the first simulant snaps.

“The human race in its entirety,” Rimmer says amiably. “But I am also something of an expert. I don’t like to brag, but at school I was voted most like to spell out his suicide letter using Scrabble tiles, so.” He rolls his shoulders back, triumph in every inch of the movement. “I’m something of a local legend when it comes to the rules and legislation of spelling-related board games.”

The two leader simulants exchange a bewildered glance. Lister knows exactly how they feel.

“Well,” the first simulant goes on, after a beat, “regardless… with this evening entertainment lined up, we have no need to torture you—but we will, if we feel that you are not being forth-coming with the answers that we require in order to facilitate the conquest of your ship.” She pauses for a moment to regard them evenly, her gaze hard and unflinching. “This is the part where usually we would torture your ship’s commanding officers so that the rest of your crew hands over control of their vessel… However, seeing as there are apparently only four of you on this enormous ship, this should be much simpler. We are willing to skip the torture, therefore, if one of you agrees to surrender the information willingly in exchange for their freedom, so that—”

Rimmer leans over, putting himself more readily into their eye-line. “Arnold Rimmer,” he says immediately. “Hi. Happy to be of service.”

Lister starts swearing.

“I may have to some degree inflated my importance within the ship, as yes, I am technically the highest ranking personnel member aboard _Red Dwarf_ , but only by accident—I’m actually the supervisor of a vending machine sanitation team, but then I killed myself and a hundred other people through sheer incompetence,” Rimmer is saying, babbling as fast as he can. “This is Dave Lister, the last human being alive, although he barely qualifies for that title, being quite as disgusting as he looks, and we’ve masturbated together a few times, but I have no idea what that means.”

“Rimmer!” Lister hisses, flushing hot all the way to his ears.

“The codes you’re after are as follows—do you have a pen? No worries, I’ve got one, although of course that’s not much good to you, seeing as I’m a hologram, but perhaps I could write it on my hand and you could take a photograph?” Rimmer’s voice is the politest it’s ever been, actually smegging simpering, and Lister wants to kick his teeth in. “Oh, you have your own pen? Even better. Ah, the smooth-nibbed blue Bic, I see. Good choice.”

“You’re a scum-sucking, treacherous weasel,” Lister rants. “One job. We had _one job_ and you—”

“Sshh, not now, Listy, I’m busy,” Rimmer says. “Where were we? Ah, yes—if you input oh-five-seventy-seven-thirty-six-A, that will override the door controls and allow you to get just about anywhere you like on the operations deck. Now, taking over the drive room is a little trickier, but I’m happy to accompany you and explain as we go.”

“You can help us to take command of this vessel?” the lead simulant asks.

“Absolutely.”

“Even though we plan to kill your fellow crew-members once we have control?”

“My only regret is that I don’t have hands with which to plunge in the figurative dagger by myself,” Rimmer says pleasantly. “When do we begin?”

Lister stares dejectedly at the far wall, and he tries to reason with himself. It’s hopeless getting upset at Rimmer for selling them out to save his own skin—it’s like complaining at a dog for licking its arsehole, or at a pigeon for crapping on your windows; it’s just hard-wired into them. The real idiot here is Lister, for getting duped into thinking he could train a pigeon to use the toilet. No matter how long you spent getting to know Rimmer, having a laugh occasionally, winding him up the rest of the time, he’s still never gonna wake up one morning with any basic decency. More fool him.

“Now, could I please be freed?” Rimmer asks. “Not that I don’t love being tied up and threatened, of course, but…”

The lead simulant nods to one of the others, who presses a switch on a holowhip remote, and the length which binds Rimmer falls away with a clatter of sparks. Rimmer flinches back, then lets out a shaky breath. He takes a moment to stretch, rolling his shoulders and wrists as though to get his blood flowing again, like he even has a pulse.

“Right,” he says, then, and claps his hands together, cheerful as anything. “Shall we?”

As he stands, he does throw a look back over his shoulder at Lister, like he’s considering an apology, but Lister doesn’t even look at him, and either way, Rimmer seems to think better of it. He just slinks away, tail between his legs, the snivelling, pathetic wanker.

“That was probably the most callous betrayal I’ve seen yet,” comments the remaining simulant, almost sympathetically, with her gun still trained on Lister’s chest.

“Oh, smeg off,” Lister mutters.

There is a screen mounted on the wall across from where Lister is sitting, depicting a fuzzy monochrome image of the ship’s security feed, on which Lister can see Rimmer leading the simulants briskly down the corridor back to _Red Dwarf_. Lister tilts his head to see it better, past the simulant’s shoulder, and she turns to follow his gaze.

“Ah, yes,” she says with satisfaction. “This is always good fun—hang on, I’ll get the sound on, shall I?” She taps a few buttons at the edge of the screen, and with a faint crackle, the voices come through.

“—have no strong attachment to this ship or anyone on it, to tell the truth,” Rimmer is saying grandly. “I’ve always thought of them as beneath me, you know? I think a life with you, terrorising the galaxy would be much more interesting—and if I may be so bold, it seems like it would have much better promotion prospects—”

As they approach the airlock, the voices get fainter, and the simulant swears under her breath. She turns her back entirely to fiddle with the screen, typing something into a small keyboard, and Lister takes the opportunity to test the strength of the cabling he’s bound in. It’s strong, and the more he tries to fight against it, the worse he splits the rubber casing to expose more of his body to the bare copper wire. However, he’s tied around the upper arms and chest, and there is a small amount of wiggle room around his wrists—maybe if he could just free up his hands a tiny bit more…

“There we go,” the simulant says triumphantly, and steps back to show Lister her work: the screen now depicts the security feed of _Red Dwarf_ , the cameras following Rimmer and the other simulant through the corridors to the drive room.

“—much beloved by the crew, so yes, I’m certain it will break their hearts, but since they’ll be dead soon anyway, I imagine they’ll get over it,” Rimmer says. “Right, here we are.” He leads the way into the drive room, where Kryten and the Cat are also held captive. Kryten is unbound but looking unhappy, presumably held in place by some threat; the Cat, apparently a greater threat, is tied up, although there is a loose end to the rope that he is able to swat with one free hand, and he seems to be quite enjoying himself.

“Mr. Rimmer, sir!” Kryten wails. “Thank goodness you’re alright—where’s Mr. Lister?”

“Ah, hello, Kryten. Lister is… well, it’s not important at the moment. We’re going to hand over _Red Dwarf_ to these lovely simulants, in accordance with Space Corps Directive 2314/405.”

Kryten blinks at Rimmer. “We’re what?”

Rimmer’s smile strains. “Space Corps Directive 2314/405,” he repeats slowly, “with these chaps here,” and that’s when Lister realises that Rimmer is attempting something very dangerous that he’s not nearly clever enough for. What’s more, Kryten doesn’t know enough about deception and all-round human bastardry to pick up what Rimmer’s putting down, and even from here, Lister can see them hurtling blindly towards catastrophe.

“But why?” Kryten says, aghast. “Sir, I don’t think anyone on board is qualified to perform an exorcism, and what exactly are we all supposed to do while you’re off gallivanting with the horse?”

“Oh, forget it,” Rimmer snaps. He turns, then, to the control panel, clears his throat dramatically, and in his most pompous, self-important voice, declares, “Holly! Control of this vessel is being handed over to these lovely simulants, toot-suite.”

Flashing up onto the screen, Holly stares, bewildered, between the two of them. “You what? Not a chance, mate. Jog on.”

The lead simulant looks at Rimmer, eyes narrowed. “I thought you said that you were in command of this vessel.”

“In command?” Holly echoes incredulously. “Rimmer couldn’t command his own bowels.”

Rimmer’s mouth opens and shuts helplessly like a goldfish. His jaw works, his ears burning. At last, his voice strangled, he manages, “How dare you speak to me in this way!”

“I wouldn’t trust him to operate a spoon, let alone a mining ship,” Holly goes on. “If the choice of command was between Arnold Rimmer or a blind chihuahua, I’d set up a stick and a stool.”

The simulant takes a deep breath. “Can you or can you not grant us control of this vessel?”

“Yes,” Rimmer says, at precisely the same moment that Holly says, “Absolutely not.”

The simulant passes a flat, unimpressed look between them, and then holsters the gun. She strides towards Rimmer, and without hesitating, reaches into the centre of his chest and grabs hold of his light-bee. Lister jerks upright in his seat, leaning forwards to better see what’s going on, and he watches in horror as the projection of Rimmer jitters, flickers, and when it stabilises, Rimmer stands immobile, looking like might have just dropped the entire contents of his digestive system down his trousers.

Rimmer gulps. “Erm—alright. Let’s all calm down, shall we? Why don’t we have a calm, reasonable discussion about this?”

“Either you get me control of this ship, or I crush your light-bee like an overripe tomato.”

“Ah.” Rimmer squirms. “Yes. Alright. Well. Perhaps we should get Lister up here.”

Lister grimaces at the simulant still with him. “That’s my cue.”

The simulant hesitates. She reaches for a small silver button, leans in close to the screen, and says, “Everything alright up there?”

“No, everything is not alright,” the lead simulant mutters. “Hang on—give me a moment to think.”

“Do you need me to bring the other hostage up?”

“Then that’s all of them.”

“What?”

“All four.”

“I can bring back-up?” the second simulant suggests. “Or more weapons?”

“You can leave me tied-up, if that helps,” Lister offers. “I’m a really accommodating hostage. I don’t mind.”

“Shut up,” the second simulant says, and then her boss crackles through the intercom again.

“Alright. Bring him here—but keep him bound and be ready to shoot him in the head if he tries anything.”

Lister sucks in a deep breath. It’s not ideal, but he’ll take it. When the simulant turns around, he gives her his cheeriest, most smeg-eating and irritating grin—the one Rimmer says makes him understand the boyhood impulse to put heads down toilets—and says, “Where to?”

The walk back to _Red Dwarf_ feels much longer when he’s got his hands zip-tied behind his back and a gun pressed against the back of his skull. Everywhere he looks, when he dares to glance from one side to another to scope out his surroundings, there are simulants with weapons drawn. Every single of the forty-three so-called slaves is now kitted out in full battle gear and looks pissed off at Lister personally. So far, it isn’t looking good.

He, his guard-simulant, and two others, head up to the drive-room to join the others, and as they wait for the lift, Lister shifts restlessly, trying to plan. If him and Rimmer are on the same page—if, in fact, Rimmer is actually trying to be helpful rather than save his own skin, although that’s always a sizeable _if_ —then everything counts on getting to Holly without the simulants catching on.

With a low hum, the lift doors open, and Lister leads the way into the drive-room.

“Here he is,” Rimmer says, sounding thoroughly unimpressed by that fact, as Lister and the simulants come in. “Commander Captain Chicken-Soup Machine himself.”

Lister ignores him. In fact, he doesn’t even look at him. He can hear his pulse in his ears and he can still feel the cold bite of the gun at the back of his head.

“Oh, Mr. Lister, sir!” Kryten exclaims. “I was so foolish—I should have realised. The aliens were never real, they were androids all along, and I should have recognised it. I feel this is all my fault!”

“You’re alright, Kryten,” Lister says. “None of us twigged it. Not your fault.” He turns to the lead simulants where they are assembled by the control panels, and he nods at them. “We can’t turn over control of the ship from verbal cues. Holly, our ship’s computer—she’s got computer senility.”

“Steady on, she can hear you, you know,” Holly says, offended. “I’m not totally batty.”

“I have to type a code in,” Lister says. “I would tell you what it is, but it recognises my finger-print as well—it’ll just lock you out.”

The simulant’s eyes narrow. “Alright,” she says. “But I’m watching you. Don’t try anything funny.”

Smeg. Lister needs a distraction—something he can guarantee on being explosively disruptive, impossible to ignore, irritating to the point of inducing chaos. He reaches across for the key-pad as though to key in the passcode, and at the same time, without looking back, he says, “If I wanted to try anything funny, I’d just tell you about the mannequin that Rimmer used to keep dressed in pilfered lingerie so he could practice taking off bras one-handed—”

He doesn’t even get to finish his sentence before he can hear the massive, drawn-in gulp of air to fuel the rant to come: “Lister, you odious little blister, you have no smegging right to—”

As Rimmer’s voice rises into its highest pitch of fervour and fury, the muzzle of the gun pressed Lister’s head slackens just slightly, the metal no longer clean against his skull, and Lister decides that’s as good a chance as he’s going to get. Without warning, he dives along the controls to reach the panel in front of the captain’s chair, where there is a glass case to be flipped up, and under it, a red switch marked Code 4. Panic room.

The gun goes off wildly, a frantic burst of rounds that echo in Lister’s ears, but he doesn’t die, so for now he’s counting that a good sign. He flips the switch, and then shouts, “Now, Holly!”

The blast doors to the drive-room slam shut with a deafening clang, and the sound for the interior deadbolt sliding into place echoes through the room. The simulants jump back, startled, and they go for their weapons but the one guarding Lister has to reload now, and before the others can draw, he charges them with a totally idiotic primal yell.

It doesn’t do much other than lend extra weight to the element of surprise that Lister is working with here, and he slams bodily into the lead simulant to hurl her to the floor. No finesse, no sportsmanship, just all one-seventy pounds of deadweight thrown at high speed, shoulder-first, into her stomach, and they both go crashing violently to the ground.

For a moment, they struggle together, both going for the mini-bazookoid in her hand—Lister scrabbles for it, she scratches the back of his hand, he kicks at her knee, and she elbows him hard enough in the nose that he sees stars and his vision goes white around the edges. Then she tries to knee him in the balls and he loses his grip on the bazookoid in that moment of fear when he goes to protect the family jewels—and then another simulant is pointing the business end of the bazookoid in his face and Lister, sprawled on his back, has nothing to say other than, “Oh, smeg.”

Then Kryten comes up behind her with a loose section of military-grey pipe, and swings it with all his force to the side of the simulant’s head.

“Nice one, Krytes,” Lister exclaims, grabbing the bazookoid as he scrambles to his feet.

There’s no sign of Rimmer, but even the Cat is taking part and trying to be useful, baring his teeth and slapping at the nearest unarmed simulant, but to tell the truth, the most useful impact he has is in the way that he keeps getting in the way and underfoot. He makes for a great little agent of mass distraction, and now that Lister finds himself with a gun, this feels much more evenly matched.

“Alright, drop it!” he shouts, levelling the mini-bazakooid at them. He still has the safety catch on, but he’s hoping they aren’t clued up to that. “Drop it or I start redecorating the drive room with a tasteful simulant-guts theme.”

The lead simulant on the floor shakily raises her hands above her head, and the others follow suit afterwards. The Cat makes quick work of gathering up their weapons in a heap on the floor, and then gets his miniature lint-brush out to dust off his lapels.

“Right. The ship’s being vented as we speak,” Lister says, his voice adenoidal and distinctly clogged-up in a way he doesn’t wanna look too hard at. “In less than ten minutes, outside this room will be totally uninhabitable. I can create an airlock to let you out. If you leave now, you can probably make it back to the docking station before you suffocate. Then again, if that’s no good for you today, you can always stay here, abandoned by your ship and crew-mates, stranded in deep space with the guys you just tried to kill, who definitely still want to kick the smeg out of you. And I don’t know about you,” he pauses here, glances around at Kryten and the Cat, “but I’ve got a lot more kicking left in me yet.”

The simulant’s gaze darts nervously between Lister and Kryten. “You would simply… let us leave?”

“Like I said at the start—no trouble, no funny business. No hidden motives. We’re just trying to get through the day.”

“As are we. Not all are lucky enough to be left with a fully-equipped vessel the size of a city. Sometimes we must learn to survive in different ways. If others will not help us, we must instead act in order to help ourselves.”

Lister considers this. “I dunno. Maybe try saying please next time. I hear that works loads better than kidnap and nipple torture. And the clock’s still ticking.”

“How do we know that stepping into this airlock won’t just kill us instantly?”

Lister shrugs. “Guess you don’t. Let’s hope we’re not as scummy as you guys are.”

Strangely, this doesn’t seem give the simulants a great deal of comfort. They exchange apprehensive looks, but they do accept. They scramble quickly to their feet, muttering something halfway between gratitude and apology, delivered in the tone of _go fuck yourself_. Kryten mans the airlock, and then, after the doors close behind them and there is the distant sucking sound of the airlock depressurizing, they are gone.

The fight drains out of Lister and he slumps against the panel at his back.

“Oi, d’you mind?” Holly’s voice comes through, muffled but still clear enough to hear her irritation. “Not what I want to get an eyeful of. Haven’t I had a bad enough day already?”

“Sorry, Hol,” Lister says, and he pushes himself back up.

“Sir, your face—” Kryten stammers, and when Lister wipes his nose with the back of his hand, his knuckles come away smeared with blood.

“I’m alright,” Lister says, wiping his hand on his trousers. “You really reckon they’ll make it back to their ship in time?”

“We won’t know until later. It’s a two-minute walk to the docking station, which is manageable, especially if they hurry. However, it’s down a flight of stairs, and if they get lost—well, let’s just say we’ll find ourselves with a handful of new simulant-skin rugs.”

“Ugh.” Lister wrinkles his nose.

“Just think,” the Cat exclaims. “Something new to put vindaloo sauce on!” 

Lister looks around. “Hey—where’s Rimmer?” he asks, and when he turns around to scan the drive-room, that’s when he spots the tell-tale huddle of a quilted jacket under a table in the corner.

It’s not fondness that Lister feels, then, seeing that Rimmer is safe and snivelly as ever—indigestion, maybe, or resignation to the next thousand years alongside the biggest coward in the known universe—but he breathes a sigh of relief. Lister crosses to him, and then squats beside the table so that he is roughly at the same level.

“Heya, weasel,” Lister says, and half-smiles. “Alright down there?”

“Very well, thank you,” Rimmer says mildly.

Lister drums his hands on the side of the table. “Can’t believe you almost did something brave there. Almost.”

Rimmer pauses. “Do you think you could say that again when everyone else is listening?”

Lister rolls his eyes. “No way. That’s all you’re getting from me, and you’re lucky you got that much. Come on, big man. Up you get.” He dusts his hands off on the bum of his trousers and bounces up to his feet.

However, when Rimmer gets to his feet, stumbling and shaky, he lifts his head and a look of alarm flashes across his face. “Lister—” he starts, and one hand lifts abortively towards Lister’s face before he thinks better of it.

“Oh,” Lister says, and he hikes up the hem of his T-shirt to scrub clean the dried blood from his nose and upper lip. It leaves a big, brown, crusty smear that Rimmer recoils bodily away from, but Lister reckons his nosebleed is drying up now, so it’s fine. “I got clobbered,” he says. “But it’s fine. You should see the other guy. He’s gonna be having his dinner through a straw.”

“Very impressive,” Rimmer says, as they rejoin the others. “Of course, none of this would’ve been possible without my ingenious plan, so really—now, I wouldn’t use the word _hero_ , much less, say, _a legend for the twenty-fifth century_ —but well, let’s just say it. I was incredible.”

The Cat frowns. “Did I dream the part where you almost got us all killed?”

“Ah,” Rimmer says, with a benevolent smile. “But I didn’t.”

Lister looks between them, and then with a shrug, he admits, “Can’t argue with that,” and Rimmer positively beams.

***

Kryten doesn’t drink but he’s still having a good time, even playing mother hen to the rest of them as they gradually get sloppier and stupider. The Cat’s the drunkest, if Lister had to put money on it, but only because he’s so terrible at Blackjack that he had a three-shot head start on the rest of the crew. Now they’ve moved on to Most Likely, which fortunately for the Cat has less to do with maths. Unfortunately for Lister, though, it’s more to do with accusing each other of being disgusting, depraved, or all of the above—and so the score has even out somewhat.

“Most likely to forget someone’s name?”

They all point at the Cat, who says, “I’ve forgotten all your names already.”

“Most likely to call someone the wrong name on purpose to smeg them off?” Lister says, and for that all fingers point to Rimmer.

With a dramatic flourish, Rimmer bows left and right. “Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all night.”

“Most likely to get punched in the face?” Lister adds, and nothing changes.

Rimmer, faced with the accusations of his three crew-mates, looks scandalised. “I resent that! Lister was in loads more fights than me. The first few weeks we bunked together I thought the black eye was a birthmark.”

“Yeah, but that’s only ‘cause I never started anything I couldn’t finish. I never called someone’s mum an ugly slag and then hid under a table.”

“Oh, pshaw,” Rimmer says, and actually says _pshaw_ _._ “That was one time.”

“I can think of three separate occasions when that happened, without even having to rack my brain.”

“Once, six times,” Rimmer says, flapping one hand dismissively. “Whatever. It all gets muddled together after a while. It’s unimportant.”

“Drink,” Lister says, pointing at him in a way that brooks no argument. “Bottoms up.”

Rimmer’s not quite ready for it, and he chokes and splutters on the shot of whatever Holly’s knocking back for him, and he coughs, eyes watering. “Any chance we could dilute it with something just marginally sweeter—petrol, perhaps?”

“No way,” Holly says gravely. “You drink the Lambrini neat or not at all.”

“Oh, is not at all an option?” Rimmer asks, perking up, and this is met with raucous booing as they all give Rimmer a piece of their mind, even Kryten joining in to call Rimmer a shameful spoilsport, which for Kryten is like being told to go fuck your mother. “Oh, alright, alright.” Rimmer slaps both hands soundly to his thighs. “Holly—hit me again.”

“Wrench or mallet?”

“No, you simple-minded gimboid, with a drink.”

“Sure I can’t change your mind?”

Rimmer gives her his idea of a winning smile, a thin, smug thing which is all chin and no charm. “Quite sure.” He recoils as Holly knocks it back for him, grimacing with a laboured hiss like he’s expecting to start spouting fire. “Delicious,” he says, and his voice is a throaty rasp.

“Most likely to be sick before the night out even starts?” Lister points at Rimmer again and laughs.

“It’s not cowardly, it’s tactical.”

“Bold of you to assume he’d been invited on a night out,” the Cat exclaims, and Lister has to admit that there’s a certain tragic truth in that.

“You remember that time Petersen used to call you—what was it—”

“Don’t you dare,” Rimmer warns, and Lister pays him no mind because he’s got the visual in his head of a spectacular sparkly projectile puke-athon, but he just can’t remember the name they gave Rimmer for it.

“Lister, don’t,” Rimmer says again, and Rimmer is too proud to beg but there’s an element of it somewhere because it’s not a threat this time, and it is just as Lister remembers—the Fizzing Fountain—that Lister also decides not to push it further.

“Nah, I can’t remember,” he lies, and besides, he figures he can put a pin it and use it wind Rimmer up somewhere down the line. He rocks back on two legs of his chair, a long, lazy lean, and Rimmer meets his eyes across the table, one eyebrow lifted. Lister just gives back the biggest, sunniest, most annoying grin, and Rimmer rolls his eyes, and looks back at Kryten, who is just in the early throes of a speech about the intricacies of Plutonian vomiting ritual practices.

Games nights always end up slightly all over the place like this—one minute, embarrassing Rimmer ‘til his ears glow; the next, listening to pointless circular arguments on glass-cleaner which always get more heated than any discussion on cleaning products has any right to be. There is what Rimmer refers to as _loud, senseless noise_ blaring, which happens to be Lister’s exact favourite sub-genre of Rastabilly Skank, and they play games first that involve silly things being put on their heads, and then games like Guess That Fart as the activities of the evening get gradually less athletic and more stupid, according to the level of drunkenness. Pin the Cock on the Gay Beefcake Magazine that Lister found hidden in a cupboard in the drive room; Sip Sip Shot, complete with the hilarity of Kryten trying to go anywhere at maximum pelt, let alone when he’s steaming on several bottles of antifreeze; taking a shot of eye-watering tequila and trying to say, _super rooty tooty fresh and fruity_ without wincing or laughing.

The first casualty of the evening goes to Kryten, who over-balances in his chair and crashes to the ground in a heap, smacking his head on the side of the table on the way down, leaving a sizeable dent in his head—a dent just perfect for Lister to use him as a bottle opener. It would be no good listing the following casualties, because it racks up pretty fast, and by the time they reach the wee hours of the morning, there are only two. The Cat has fallen asleep on the table and Kryten is unconscious on the ground running a trouble-shooting programme on his common sense chip, after something earlier that the Cat said about how insane it was that Kryten used to be the sensible one!

Now it’s just Rimmer and Lister at the table, half-slumped, half-bleary, and still trying to focus. At least, Rimmer is trying to focus; Lister is happily just sitting there, nursing his thirteenth lager, letting Rimmer attempt to convince him that he’s got latent psychic abilities. His face is so scrunched up it almost seems to be folding in on itself and there is a vein standing out in his forehead as he searches deep inside Lister’s mind, or gives himself a hernia, whichever comes first.

“You,” Rimmer says, at last, “have never had a girlfriend for longer than six months.”

“Wrong,” Lister says with a grin, and he gestures to Rimmer. “Drink.”

When the next one hits him, Rimmer barely flinches this time. He’s had a lot already and he is pretty lopsided in his chair, one hand braced against the table. “No way,” he says. “I don’t believe it. _You’ve_ had a long-term girlfriend? As if.”

“Jodie Fairhurst,” Lister says with satisfaction, leaning back in his chair. “I was sixteen. We started going out while we were studying for our O-levels. She would make these cute little colour-coded flashcards, and I’d sit there trying to distract her. She’d write practice essays on Hamlet and I’d raid her dad’s fridge for beer. You know, a proper romantic high school sweethearts situation.”

“So what happened?”

“She went off to one college and I went to another. She was too busy to dump me ‘til Christmas so… jackpot.”

Rimmer frowns. “That doesn’t count.”

“Why not?” Lister exclaims. “We got together in April and she only got ‘round to humiliating us in front of all my mates in December. That’s eight months. I might have failed all me exams but I can at least count that high.”

“She was only in a relationship with you through absent-minded neglect,” Rimmer argues. “By that logic, I should be preparing for mine and McGruder’s golden anniversary. By that logic, I had an affectionate and fulfilling relationship with my father.”

“Alright, alright.”

“So?” Rimmer folds his arms across his chest.

With a slow and deliberate emphasis, Lister picks up his shot glass, sloshes it before Rimmer’s eyes, and knocks it back. It burns all the way down, but a good burn, the kind that spreads warmly underneath his skin afterwards and leaves him feeling loose and easy. “Still doesn’t make you psychic, though.”

“Oh, don’t you worry, Listy. I’m only getting started.” Rimmer makes a show of rolling his shoulders back, settling back into his seat, and propping an elbow on the table to point into Lister’s face. His finger sways, but his eyes narrow with concentration, like he actually believes that he’s not just pulling this out of his arse. “You… have never learned to use a washing machine.”

“That’s not psychic, that’s just obvious.”

Tutting, Rimmer changes gear. “Alright, then, you—you—erm, you don’t have any allergies. I mean, aside from the obvious allergy to deodorant, that is.”

Lister flips him two fingers. “Anyway—wrong. Allergic to dryer sheets. Why d’you think you never see me tumble-dry my clothes?”

“Hmm…” Rimmer taps his chin with his forefinger as though deep in thought. “Because you’re a lazy, slobbish git?”

“Ha. No. Your turn to drink.”

Rimmer’s eyes narrow. “I mean, exactly how allergic are you?”

“Rashy. And once I got the squirts, too, although I dunno if that was related.”

Eyes closed in apparent agony, Rimmer says delicately, “Lovely mental image, thank you.” He shakes himself bodily. “And that’s not a real allergy, then. That’s just you being difficult. If you haven’t got to cart round an epi-pen, it doesn’t count.”

“It absolutely does! I don’t need it to be life-threatening, it’s still an allergy. Hol, give him a drink.”

There’s no response, and when they look over, they see Holly slumped forwards asleep, cheek squashed across the screen, lipstick smeared and mouth wide open.

Rimmer looks back to Lister with glee. “Does this mean I win by default?”

“No smegging way, man. You’re still not psychic. Psycho, maybe. You’ve got your psys all mixed up.”

“My size all mixed up?” Rimmer echoes. “Nope. Got that one squared away. Five eleven precisely, exactamundo, no rounding up needed. Thank you, father.” With that, he reaches up, as though to the heavens, as though holding out his hand to someone long gone but never quite forgotten… and he sticks up two fingers with a long, drawn-out fart noise.

It’s stupid, immature, but it gets Lister in stitches, and Rimmer looks so pleased with himself at that it’s hard to hate him. Hard to think that this guy—half-smiling, loose-limbed and silly, uniform askew—is the same insufferable prick who last week set fire to half of Lister’s clothes in protest against the state of the laundry basket, who only yesterday made the entirety of their sleeping quarters unusable while he set three skutters to the task of bleaching everything the Cat had ever touched. _Rimmer is a useless, infuriating, petty, spiteful, cowardly little wasp of a man_ , Lister reminds himself, _he’s a smeg-head and he always lets you down_ , but the words are ringing a bit hollow when Lister is grinning at him in a way that he can’t remember doing in years, wide enough that it kind of hurts his face.

“Rest in peace, you delusional, mouth-foaming old git,” Rimmer rants. “Farewell, you emotionally constipated, neurotic bastard. And ta-ra, adieu, and toodle-oo to all his stupid smeggy expectations.”

Lister crosses his arms. “Gosh, you really don’t let him get to you anymore, do you?” he remarks. 

“Nope. I hardly ever think of him,” Rimmer says cheerily, and with that, he stands—swaying dramatically and blinking too fast. “If only he could see me now… commander of my own ship—”

“Are not.”

“—respected, nay, admired by all—”

“Are _not_.”

“—discovering new and uncharted regions of deep space—”

“Alright, I’ll give you that one. Though I dunno how much discovering gets done from cowering under tables...”

“—all while handsome and dignified and _tall_ ,” Rimmer finishes with theatrical emphasis, inhaling deeply, nostrils at maximum power.

Lister hesitates. 

Rimmer looks at him, all tipsy imperiousness down the length of his nose. “The only thing left is a knighthood, really,” he says. “A knighthood, a woman to whom to give my babies, and a building named after me.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you?”

“I don’t think it’s so ridiculous,” Rimmer says. “I mean, yes, I’m dead, I’m composed entirely of light, the human race is extinct, there are no buildings left, much less women with functional ovaries—but in spite of these very minor setbacks, I’m quite certain that all of this lies reasonably enough within my grasp.”

Lister looks up and studies him, because he can’t tell whether or not Rimmer’s actually serious. Most of the time he would say that Rimmer doesn’t know how to tell a joke, has a worse sense of humour than a German mortician, but he’s pretty sure that Rimmer is actually taking the piss out of himself tonight, and even more surprising, Lister is having fun with him. “Alright, then,” he says, slapping both hands to his thighs and getting to his feet. “Come on. I’ll knight you.”

Rimmer blinks at him. “You?” he echoes. “You’re not qualified to knight me. You’re not qualified to do—well, anything.”

“Maybe. But I think you’ll find that I am also the highest ranking human being alive.” Lister spreads his arms akimbo. “There’s no-one more qualified.”

“Technically, that does also make you the lowest ranking human being alive.”

“Not to mention, I am also God,” Lister points out, and he raises his eyebrows. “Ey? Not many people can say that.” He does a dramatic sweeping bow, doffing his hat and dragging it through a slop of spilled lager and whiskey. “Plus, it’ll be a nice little feather in my cap,” he says. “It’ll mean I’m higher than you.”

“No way,” Rimmer objects instantly. “No.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I’m graciously bestowing this on you, because you are my subject, and—”

“In no realm of reality am I your subject—”

“And you’ve gotta pledge—what is it—pledge fealty to your King and Lord,” Lister declares, prancing backwards in his act of being regal and royal and majestic—and then he stacks it. Of course, he has no idea how it happens, he’s pretty drunk and gravity is against him, but one second he’s just dicking about as normal, and then suddenly his ankle wobbles and all his balance is gone and he’s dropping like a sack of smeg.

“Lister—” Rimmer bursts out, and lunges forwards to grab him, and then Lister falls straight through.

He twats his elbow on the table on the way down, and then crashes hard onto his side with a momentous bang that causes the Cat to lift his head and blearily, “Not now… five more minutes.”

Then Lister is lying in a heap on the floor, dissolving into laughter, while Rimmer just stands helplessly over him, wide-eyed, arms outstretched, looking fairly nonplussed.

“You twonk,” Lister says from the floor. “You useless piece of smeg.”

“Oh, right, thanks very much,” Rimmer says haughtily, straightening his jacket. “Last time I try to be chivalrous. No more opened doors, no more bouquets of roses—”

“Careful, man,” Lister says. “Too much heroism and you might strain something. Don’t hurt yourself.”

“Are you alright?” Rimmer asks at last.

Lister quickly pats himself down—hair, chest, gut, bollocks—and flashes Rimmer a double thumbs-up. “All in one piece.”

Rimmer holds out a hand to him, and without thinking, Lister grabs it to haul himself up—or at least he tries to, and falls back flat again when his hand and Rimmer’s pass clean through each other.

“Sorry,” Rimmer says, “what was it you just called me?”

“Oh, piss off,” Lister says, rolling onto his hands and knees, as he struggles to his feet, and then they are standing there grinning at each other like a pair of total gimboids, and Lister’s hat is wonky and Rimmer's hair is wild and it’s the most normal Lister has felt in a long time.

They go off together in search of something with which to knight Rimmer, when they realise that Lister hasn’t got a sword—and when he just smirks at that, filthy-minded as ever, Rimmer snarks that he needs _a sword, Lister, not a letter-opener—_ and so they go digging through supply closets, through waste disposal units, abandoned lockers, and the empty quarters of the long dead. They turn up a variety of options—a metre-rule, a stale baguette, a length of copper pipe, a rolled-up blueprint, a heavy-duty torch, and an enormous glass bong. That’s the point at which the quest for a sword gets side-tracked, Lister tearing apart Officer McLaughlin’s quarters in search of any further drug paraphernalia that he can get his hands on, and he doesn’t find any weed but he does find a taxidermy ferret, which is a lot more fun.

“Rimmer,” Lister says, awestruck. “You never told me you had family aboard.”

“Ha! Hardy-har-har-har. Piss off.”

It becomes a whole new game, then—competing to see who can find the most embarrassing evidence in the quarters on the officer’s deck. They stumble together back through the long grey corridors, Rimmer tripping over his own feet, Lister throwing his arm out to lean on him and then staggering straight through, both of them reduced to silly juvenile giggling like two naughty schoolboys each time it happens.

“I can’t believe,” Rimmer says, bent double with his hands braced on his knees, “that I’ve drunk so much—so much!—and I’m still—I’m—not even slightly squiffy! I feel I am still in total possession of m’ faculties,” he goes on, and belches.

“Oh, yeah, Mr. Teetotaller, you’re stone cold sober,” Lister jeers, and he uses the elastic waistband to ping a pair of lacy ladies’ underwear through Rimmer’s chest. Rimmer swats ineffectually at them as they go sailing past, loses his balance, and almost goes arse-over-tit.

There is a delightful wealth of hilarious crap to be found, it turns out. Since officers get bigger quarters, more privacy, more storage, and more leniency, it was easier for them to smuggle aboard illegal contraband, and easier for them to conceal their depraved secrets. They find a pull-away tile in the wall behind which are concealed about twenty-seven used razor-blades; a terrifyingly enormous silicone dildo being used as a bracelet-holder; a toilet stuffed full of the stubs of joints; a small plastic Christmas tree hung with novelty condoms in different sizes and flavours; a giant animatronic Elvis head; what looks like a dismantled sex-swing; a stock-pile of loo roll so high that Lister had to clamber over it to even get through the doorway.

“I’ve got a crusty retainer!” Rimmer exclaims gleefully from by the bedside table of Lieutenant Turnock, one of _Red Dwarf_ ’s science officers. “Forty-six years old, and the man’s got braces!”

“I can beat that,” Lister says in awe, and he pulls the photograph off the pin-board it’s tacked to. “I’ve got his costume photos from the Renaissance Faire.” He gives a low whistle. “Get a load of this cod-piece.”

Rimmer scrambles back towards him, through most of the furniture, only his lack of a body saving him from his idiotic clumsiness. “What? Where?”

“Where?” Lister repeats. “What do you mean, where? He’s wearing it as a face-mask—where do you think?”

Rimmer’s eyes widen as he comes to a halt beside Lister and he sees. “Good Lord. You wouldn’t get that thing through security.”

“Security? You wouldn’t get that thing through a barn door.”

“Bet it was mostly air.”

“What?”

“That. No way Turnock was that well-endowed. The whole thing is stuffed with packing peanuts if you ask me,” Rimmer says, and Lister starts sniggering.

“Packing penis,” Lister giggles.

“Besides, I think they should have different names, cod-pieces, based on the size of the goods being packaged. Halibut-piece, anyone? Sardine-piece?”

“Speak for yourself,” Lister says, adjusting his stance, legs wide, and he frames his crotch with his hands. “They haven’t made a blue whale-piece big enough yet.”

“Dream on, Listypoos, you’re angling for minnows with what you’ve got in your boxers.”

“Excuse me, I’ll have you know that many a girl has remarked on their findings in that department.”

Rimmer snorts derisively. “Oh, really? What was the remark— _is that a pencil stub in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me_?”

Lister swaggers up close, all drunken bravado and not much common sense. “I didn’t hear much of those critiques last time,” he says, voice low, with a smirk, and his eyes track down slowly over Rimmer’s body like he’s taking him apart in his mind, and he thoroughly enjoys the way Rimmer squirms under the attention. Lister sidles in closer still, til he’s right in Rimmer’s space, his face tilted up towards Rimmer’s, and it’s hard not to feel smug when Rimmer’s eyes drop to Lister’s mouth.

“Oh, shut up,” Rimmer grumbles, and Lister, on an idiotic, drunken impulse, reaches out to grab a handful of Rimmer’s dick—and goes straight through.

Even without the contact, Rimmer bolts upright, mouth falling open, scandalised, and then Lister twats his head on the far wall with a deafening _smegging pissing wankstain bollocks and shit_.

“Well!” Rimmer huffs, straightening his lapels imperiously. “That’ll teach you to—to—objectify me.”

“Oh, you love it.” Lister, from a heap on the floor, one hand pressed to the lump that he can already feel brewing on his forehead. “Love it, love it, love it, you do—Mr. Attention. Mr. Prim Bollocks, Iron Balls—”

Rimmer gasps. “You called me Iron Balls!”

“Yeah, but—taking the piss, like. That doesn’t _count—_ ”

“It does, it counts. The nickname has taken off, it’s happening, it’s really—”

“Doesn’t count if I’m drunk and taking the piss—”

“You’re drunk?”

“I think so.” Lister holds his hands out wide. “Could a sober—could a sober person, eh—could they do this?”

With a crash and a shattering of glass, Lister goes on to prove that he probably couldn’t do it either way.

***

Morning comes like a brick to the teeth—messy and painful. Lister tries to put together the end of last night, snippets and flashes of memory coming back to him intermittently. Rimmer using his tie to demonstrate the correct way to tie a tourniquet; Lister playing keepy-ups with a vase and getting a high score of one; Rimmer singing the entirety of a Hammond Organ’s cover of _Music for Airports_ ; Lister pissing in the sink; Rimmer collapsing into Lieutenant Turnock’s bed, Lister following shortly after.

He rolls over with a groan, mouth dry, limbs sprawled, and it’s only when his knuckles bump something cold and metal and roughly the size of a heavy-duty tampon that Lister opens his eyes and realise he’s rolled into Rimmer.

“Sorry,” he rasps, easing back, but Rimmer is fast asleep and oblivious, mouth wide open, still in last night’s clothes. He has some drool at the corner of his mouth, and his hair looks like he’s been backwards through a wind tunnel. His H is lopsided. One arm is slung across the bed towards Lister, which is quite sweet until it disappears at the wrist through Lister’s sternum. Aiming for a hand on Lister’s waist, maybe, or his hip. Fair enough, although Lister reckons he’d go for the arse if he could. If he could touch Rimmer, that is. If he was real.

As Lister watches, Rimmer stirs, eyelids flickering, and when he eventually, groggily, cracks an eye open, he frowns at the sight of Lister. “Why’re you staring at me?”

“Trying to see if I can swap you for Michelle Pfeiffer through telepathy.”

Rimmer hooks a finger into the collar of his own shirt and pulls it forwards to peer inside at his chest. “No luck yet,” he mumbles, and lets it fall back against his skin. He drags a hand over his face. “God—why is air so loud?”

Lister doesn’t answer. He’s still drunk, he thinks, still totally doolally and not thinking straight, because he looks at Rimmer, realising that he’s not launching himself out of bed to do high-energy calisthenics or learn physics, he’s just lying here, quiet and sleepy and cracking terrible jokes with bad breath and worse hair, and Lister—still drunk, obviously, still very drunk—wants more than anything to kiss him, even just quickly.

“What?” Rimmer grumbles again, squinting at him.

“Nothing. Just wondering how come I don’t have a headache, is all.”

Rimmer groans. “You can have mine if you want.” He rubs at his eyes with index finger and thumb.

“Nah, you’re alright, cheers.” Lister wants to stop thinking about kissing him, but it’s hard to think of much else. The room is lit by soft yellow strip-lighting, the JMC’s attempt to mimic natural sunlight to try and keep officers from going insane in space, and it casts a dim, warm glow, making everything faintly golden. Rimmer, hungover, looks like smeg warmed up, but also looks comfortable, softer than Lister’s ever seen him.

He scrubs a hand across his face and tries to pull himself together. As he shifts position, Lister winces, his trousers uncomfortably tight. He reaches down to adjust himself inelegantly, mostly hard—but to be fair to him, he is most mornings—and pushing against his zipper. With a grunt, he sorts himself out so his dick’s got some breathing room, and looks back up to see Rimmer with his eyebrows raised.

“Do you want to deal with that?” Rimmer asks sarcastically.

Lister huffs a half-laugh. “Well, no-one else is going to.”

“I’d offer to help, but…” Rimmer lifts a hand and waves it vaguely through Lister’s shoulder to illustrate the point. “Alas.”

“Nah, you’re alright,” Lister says, shifting again, and he pushes his face deeper into the pillow. His eyes drift closed again. “I’m used to ignoring it.”

For a moment, Rimmer is quiet—for so long, Lister is almost dropping back off to sleep again. Then, in a voice so absolutely relaxed and casual that it’s almost painful, Rimmer says, “Now I’m just snowballing ideas here—just off the top of my head—just throwing it out there—that you don’t have to.”

It takes Lister a second to process. Then he opens his eyes. “Oh?”

“If you don’t want to ignore it, I mean,” Rimmer says, and he’s still trying to play it off like it’s nothing, but his voice is getting higher-pitched, and he’s sort of staring at Lister’s chest rather than looking him in the eye. “You don’t have to.”

After a moment to consider this, Lister leans back to look Rimmer in the face. “Hang on. Are you asking if I want to have a wank in Lieutenant Turnock’s bed?”

Rimmer’s mouth opens and closes, making no words but a sort of unintelligible gibberish. “If you want,” he says, at last. “I just meant—”

No further prompting needed, Lister starts wrestling with his button and fly. He doesn’t even wait for Rimmer to finish, just gets down to business, and lets out his breath in a slow sigh of relief when he unzips and takes some of the pressure off.

“Oh,” says Rimmer, like he didn’t actually think Lister would go for it, and then swallows. His eyes dart between Lister’s face and his hands as he works his trousers down, and he wets his lips in a mechanical gesture.

Lister gets his hand down the front of his boxers and takes a moment just to adjust himself again—Jesus, whose idea was it to sleep in his smegging jeans? It’s like the denim’s been playing Twister with his bollocks all night—and then, teeth in his lower lip, he pulls himself out and gets to work.

It takes some time to get started, half-asleep still, his hand too hot and dry, but Rimmer is right there, breathing shallow and watching him, which certainly helps. That’s what Lister concentrates on—Rimmer, his mouth and his hands and his narrow forearms and slim thighs. The little sounds he made last time when he was sucking on his own fingers and touching himself. Lister wants to hear him again.

The room is quiet: the buzz of the air-conditioning, the hum of the ship running around them, skin on skin. Lister breathes deep, through his nose, and tries to focus on what he’s doing, how it feels, letting it build. He doesn’t try to put on a show or anything—Rimmer’s seen all this before, anyway, he’d know the difference—but he goes through what he likes best, tries to make it good.

On the other side of the bed, Rimmer shifts and one hand flutters near his own crotch.

Lister’s eyes flick up to Rimmer. “You alright, Rimmer?” he asks, and he’s not quite breathless yet but he’s getting there.

Rimmer’s throat works. He doesn’t answer, but he nods, quick and nervous.

Easier, then, for Lister to watch his slack mouth, the nervous bob of his Adam’s apple, to replay the greatest hits of every time they’ve got off together. The way it felt to kiss him when he wasn’t trying so hard to be good at sex, to feel his pulse in his throat and press him back into the mattress.

“If I could touch you—” Rimmer bursts out, and then cuts himself off, lips clamped shut, and he looks mortified to have said anything at all.

Lister lifts his head. “Yeah?”

Rimmer squirms, looking like he’s fighting a losing battle in his head, and his ears are reddening at a speed that makes Lister worried for him. “I—” he tries, and gets no further. “I—never mind.”

“Come on, Rimmer,” Lister says. “Tell me.”

“I—I—” Rimmer swallows again. “Well, I’d—probably lick you, I imagine.”

It’s the stupidest thing Lister’s ever heard, the worst dirty talk of all time, and it shouldn’t work, but it provides the visual: Rimmer’s mouth on his skin, the slow wet drag over Lister’s throat, lower. Against all odds, it kindles something in Lister, heat curling in his gut, and his breath comes short.

“I want—I would—I mean—” Rimmer is breathing unsteadily, and he shifts again, and there’s no hiding it now, he’s as involved as Lister is, the thick line of his dick pressing against his clothes. “Your mouth—if I could get it. I’d like to—”

“Yeah, you can, you could,” Lister says, with hardly a clue what either of them are talking about, pulling himself off faster now. All he’s tuned into is the way that Rimmer is staring at his lips, his head tipped forwards as though he’s forgotten they can’t touch.

“I’d touch you,” Rimmer says, and in Lister’s head he’s got Rimmer’s thumbs digging into his hip-bones, his fingertips grazing up the inside of his thighs, and he imagines it’s Rimmer’s fist jacking him, his big, warm, stupidly gorgeous hands, and he can hear a low noise rise in the back of his throat. “I’d—wank you off, but really well. I’d make it last ages, as well. I wouldn’t—I’d do it slowly, maybe, or—or—however you wanted.”

Lister has talked Rimmer off a load of times before, egged him on and told him that he’s gonna make him come or whatever, he’s well used to it—but this is kind of blowing his mind. He’s never heard Rimmer say much of anything sexy before, seen him flinch away from talking about it in any detail, and now that Rimmer is trying to talk him through it—even though it’s terrible, it’s ridiculous, he’s got no clue how to talk dirty and make it actually sexy—but just the effort to try, and the sight of Rimmer, red-faced and breathless as he does it, leaves Lister kind of speechless and shaky.

With a struggle, Lister manages, “Yeah?”

His fingers flex on the mattress. Rimmer’s free hand lies loose against the sheet, and the way his hand curls, his fingertips stray near Lister’s. Centimetres between them. Less.

“Yes, yes—and my mouth, I’d—I’d—” Rimmer is gabbling, not making much sense, and his hips are rocking, just barely, where he lies on his side. He presses the flat of his palm over the line of his dick, sucks his breath in through his teeth, and the heat fizzing beneath Lister’s skin sears hotter. He wants to slow down, draw this out, hear the noises Rimmer makes when he’s coming apart and can’t help himself. Rimmer clears his throat. “Well, I’d—get busy. With—well. I’d let you shag my face, if you like.”

Lister kind of chokes, desire spiking through him, his dick jumping in his hand with a slick pulse, and he is picturing it in a repeating loop in his head—on his knees or on his back, Lister’s hand tight in his stupid hair, his chin tipped up, face flushed, and Lister pushing his dick into his mouth, oh God, his mouth. His stretched lips and the hot slide of his tongue and the shape of Lister’s cock through his cheek. The head of Lister’s dick slides smoothly through his fist, and it’s too easy to tighten his fingers on the upstroke, to imagine that it’s Rimmer’s mouth, and Lister makes a desperate, strangled noise which he hopes might roughly translate to, _yeah, more, keep going_.

“You could—I’d let you. You could just—well, you could do what you liked, honestly. Whatever you wanted with—with me.”

Lister’s breath comes in a burst, fingers tightening further still, but in his brain that’s Rimmer’s mouth again, his stupid pink lips catching on the head, and Lister wants so badly that he can feel his heartbeat drumming inside his ears, so badly he can’t think straight. He says, “Anything?”

“Within reason,” Rimmer says, haltingly, hesitant. His voice is hoarse, wobbly. “I mean, I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t let you, I don’t know, piss on my chest or—or feed me fetid garbage, or—”

He’s latched onto the wrong idea now, and his rambling is working against him, each repugnant idea listed less sexy than the idea before, and Lister needs to cut him off. “Rimmer—Rimmer, stop,” he tries, and he gets his free hand up towards Rimmer’s face like he’s going to try to cover his mouth or shut him up somehow—and Rimmer, in blind subconscious, opens his mouth for his fingers.

The noise that Lister makes is low and animal and totally helpless, his breath hitching in his chest, and just like that, he’s ridiculously close, hips snapping forwards to fuck hard into his own hand—Rimmer’s hand, Rimmer’s mouth—and he’s hard enough it hurts, desperate enough that he just wants to ride this to the end. Everything narrows down to the pale muddy green of Rimmer’s eyes, the heaving of his chest, the uneven flush up the column of his throat, and Lister can feel that he’s breathing open-mouthed, pathetic and needy and gulping for air like he’s drowning.

He reaches out a hand towards Rimmer, fumbling, forgetting, but Rimmer gets the message and he’s struggling with his own clothes while Lister tries to slow and hold himself off.

Words bottleneck in Lister’s throat, all stupid, brainless, idiot, horny wanting. He can’t string a sentence together, only manages, “Just tell me—tell me,” panting, ragged.

Rimmer doesn’t say anything useful, just a helpless little whine as he gets his hand down into the front of his trousers. There isn’t even enough room for him to do anything down there, but his hips rock, grinding into his own palm, and his breath is a rough, needing sound in his throat. His eyes are on Lister’s, wide and dark and desperate. “I’d be good, I’d be really good,” he rasps, his words running together, frantic. “Promise, I’d—Lister, I’d make it good—I’d suck you, I’d do whatever you wanted, I’d—I’d play with your nipples, I’d go for your arsehole, everything—”

“ _Jesus_ , Rimmer,” Lister gasps, and he comes.

It hits harder than he’s ready for, wrenching a groan from him, and when he comes back to himself as he’s riding out the shockwaves, he finds that his thighs are trembling. He feels unsteady, wrung out in a way that he shouldn’t from just beating off in bed, and when he shakes himself and looks up at Rimmer, he doesn’t really know what to do with the way that Rimmer looks at him.

At the best of times, Rimmer has a poker face like an open hand, but now he’s a floodlight. His eyes are on Lister’s mouth. He still has a hand shoved down the front of his trousers, belt tight enough against his forearm that Lister can see it digging a pink groove against his skin, but if it’s uncomfortable at all, then Rimmer’s oblivious. He is still breathing heavily, and then his gaze shifts, tracking slowly down Lister’s body—to where his shirt is rucked up to his waist, to his come-sticky hand still curled loosely around his dick. Rimmer’s tongue comes out to wet his lips, and he swallows. He meets Lister’s eyes.

Lister takes a deep breath, steadying, and then he nods pointedly at where Rimmer’s hand disappears awkwardly into the front of his trousers. “You gonna deal with that?”

Rimmer raises his eyebrows. “No, I thought I’d just go and have a cold shower,” he says, although the dripping sarcasm is sort of undermined by the threadbare rasp of his voice. “Or perhaps watch something about gardening.”

“Come on,” Lister says, and that’s it, that’s as articulate as he can get right now, and if he could touch Rimmer he’d reach across the space between them and haul him closer. He can’t, and he doesn’t. “Come on, Rimmer.”

Rimmer rolls back onto one shoulder for a better angle, and his head tips back as he breathes deep, and Lister watches the smooth pull of the muscles of his throat as he swallows. Rimmer works with his mouth open, tongue tucked into the corner of his mouth as though in concentration, and his brow furrows. Clumsily, Rimmer shimmies his trousers far down enough to get himself out through his boxers, and the second he gets his hand on himself properly, there is a stifled moan cut off in his throat. He pulls himself off fast and hard, perfunctory, and Lister’s hand stretches helplessly across the mattress again.

Lister doesn’t think of him as gorgeous, would sooner drop dead first, but—but—honestly, this is going to fuel every bored shower and idle wank for the rest of the year.

In some kind of black-out where Lister has no control over his own vocal cords, he says, “Slow down, Rimmer. I want to see.”

Rimmer’s breath is coming shorter now, every inhalation a shallow noise, his hips rolling restlessly, but he does slow, or tries to. A sound like a whine catches in his throat as he palms over the head of his dick, spreads the thin slick there. Curls of damp hair stick to the skin around his ears where he has broken out in a fine sweat. His throat is pink, chest heaving. He says, _Lister_. Thighs spread, hips flexing, lifting into his own touch, fucking into his own fist. And again— _Lister—god—Lister—_ and his voice is rougher and lower than Lister’s ever heard it, and with a long, slow shudder through the length of his spine, he comes over his fist.

For a moment they lie together in silence, coming down. Lister can feel that he has sweat through his clothes, and he’s a gunky mess, come splattered across his T-shirt, boxers, jeans, everything. He doesn’t even want to think about the state of poor Lieutenant Turnock’s sheets. And what about Rimmer? It’s something that Lister has never really considered the technicalities of—a hologram jacking off—in terms of clean-up. Is that something that Holly has to deal with, or does it just kind of… vanish? Well, he’s thinking of it now, as Rimmer wipes his hand on his own boxers and straightens out his clothes.

Then, out of nowhere, Lister starts to laugh.

Rimmer looks across at him, wearing an affronted frown. “What are you laughing at?”

“Just…” Lister can’t explain it; he shakes his head as he tucks himself away. “Where the smeg have you been hiding that?”

“Hiding what?” 

Lister’s grins spreads wider and brighter, and before he even says anything, he watches the way that Rimmer’s eyes narrow suspiciously in expectation of some smartarse comment, and he’s not wrong—Lister leans up on his elbow, head pillowed in his hand, and says conversationally, “You’re a kinky bastard, aren’t you, Rimmer?”

Rimmer gives an eye-roll of such colossal proportions that Lister’s sure it must register on the ship’s scan as an engine fault, and he drops his head back against the mattress. “Oh, piss off.”

“Too late,” Lister teases, in his mooniest, dreamiest voice. “I’m already dreaming of whipping you under the moonlight.”

“Well, you can dream on,” Rimmer retorts.

“It’s alright, Rimmer, I’ll be gentle with you,” Lister goes on. “I’ll sew little roses into your latex and everything.”

Rimmer points a finger into Lister’s face. “You’ll be sewing yourself into a body-bag, miladdo, and that is all.”

“If that’s what gets you going, then—”

“Yes, that’s right,” Rimmer interrupts, his voice rising into his tried-and-tested pedantic, pompous ass impersonation—although, admittedly, that one does sound remarkably like his ordinary voice. There is one notable difference, though, which is that the corner of his mouth lifts somewhere near a smile. “Nothing gets me fired up like a touch of casual necrophilia. In fact, I like to spend my free time cruising the local graveyard for any dessicated corpses with low standards that I might like to pull.”

“If anything, shagging corpses should be my area of expertise.”

“I’m not a corpse,” Rimmer objects. “Look at me. I’m full of life. Full of pep and zap and zazz. I’m positively vivacious.”

“You never smegging shut up about being dead!” Lister says around a laugh. “You’re, like, the President of the Dead Complainer’s Society.”

“I should hope so!” There is no doubt about it now—Rimmer is smiling, and Lister can feel himself grinning like a total dope in echo of it. “I’d like to see who the smeg else is going to usurp me—not least because I would have a formal letter of complaint worded in the strongest possible terms before the cushion had even lost the imprint of my buttocks.”

Lister rolls over to press his face into the pillow—knocking, again, Rimmer’s light-bee as he does so, which leads to a whole other stupid argument because _how can it be that I only occupy three inches of physical space and yet I_ still _feel like you’re hogging the whole bed_ —and they’re tangled in still-warm sheets with all the world between them, but the distance, for once, doesn’t seem insurmountable.

***


	5. Red Tunic

**V**

The arrival of a mail-pod is one of the most exciting things to happen in weeks, and while a part of Lister wants to savour every moment, to stretch out the novelty for as long as he can—let’s be honest. He can’t help himself. He dives straight in, pulling out fistfuls of post in search of anything exciting. The Cat doesn’t understand the appeal, sprawled on Lister’s bunk in a position that looks anything but comfortable, twisted around on himself—not asleep, but dozing, awake enough to complain every time someone dares to disturb him.

“This is all junk,” Rimmer says disdainfully, peering over Lister’s shoulder at the pile as he rifles through. 

“I dunno, some of it could still be a laugh,” Lister says, and he turns over one envelope to show Rimmer. “This is the fifth one of these I’ve found. Who knew that Hollister had applied for so many sexual dysfunction patient trials?”

Rimmer snorts. “I could’ve predicted that.”

“Is there anything for me?” Kryten asks, and he reaches across to cautiously pluck a small cardboard package off the top of the pile.

“Why would there be?” Rimmer asks. “Did you leave a forwarding address with the _Nova 5_?”

“I’ve ordered a new mop-head, and I _know_ that it said it would take at least three years to send the drone out to us, but—well, I’m just too excited to wait!”

Lister shakes his head with a disbelieving laugh. “I’ll keep an eye out,” he tells Kryten. “Nothing yet, though.”

It takes the best part of an afternoon just to sort the post into piles, aided by the skutters and Rimmer’s barked orders. For a while their productivity plummets, though, as Lister tries to open a letter before it makes it through the pile-organising process, and gets a skutter smacking him in the shin for the audacity. The argument that follows— _it’s for me, Rimmer, I’m not gonna leave it to one side for hours and hours if someone’s actually written to me—_ and the ensuing name-calling match sends the Cat grumbling away to find somewhere quieter to sleep, and Lister makes the whole thing much worse by picking up a handful of letters from one of Rimmer’s meticulously organised piles and throwing them through him. It doesn’t have the effect he wanted, as the paper kind of flutters directionlessly everywhere, but it drives Rimmer nuts, so Lister considers it a job well done.

Later, when he does get around to opening his letter—because, fine, so sue him, he buckles under to pacify Rimmer and he sets the letter reverently aside until he has finished helping to tidy up—it turns out to be a waste of time anyway.

“Was it everything you dreamed of?” Rimmer asks sarcastically. “Sweet nothings from someone long dead? Have you been elected Prime Minister? Have you won a holiday to the Seychelles?”

Lister rubs at his face. “It’s a speeding ticket.”

Rimmer actually honks with laughter, the smugness radiating from him like the drive-plate’s ruptured all over again.

On the bright side, there are parcels to the rest of the dead crew that Lister can pilfer—videos, books, care-packages of sweets that have long since expired, not that Lister minds; there are magazines and photographs of loved ones and a DIY embroidery kit and a set of watercolours that Rimmer looks longingly at and Lister lets him have, because he knows that Rimmer’s own set dried up a couple millennia ago and so he’s not been able to make a timetable that he’s satisfied with since.

The first magazine that Lister comes across is some scientific journal, full of the latest medical advancements and experimental breakthroughs, and it’s not really the sort of thing he would typically go for—not enough pictures, and none of them with jokes or boobs or any of the stuff he likes—but he figures there might be a mention of some science-y thing that could take them back to Earth, so it’s worth a look.

Settled on his bunk, Lister flips idly through, muttering as he goes, “Boring… boring… boring… Totally boring… Boring…” He turns to the next page, and then bursts out with a laugh. “Oh, ey. You’ve won an award.”

At the table, Rimmer is scrutinising the football results in a newspaper which is three million years out of date, but at that, he lifts his head. “What?”

Unable to keep down his grin, Lister flips the magazine around to show Rimmer the headline: _WORM WINS NOBEL PRIZE._

Rimmer gives him a flat look. “Very funny.”

Lister turns the magazine back and starts to read aloud for Rimmer’s benefit. “The committee for the Nobel Prize worked long and hard to select the recipients of the 2694th Nobel Prize for Physiology, awarding outstanding discoveries in life sciences and medicine, but has at long last come to the controversial decision of awarding the Prize to the worm farm whose study, over a quarter of a millennia, led to the accidental discovery of the rare subatomic element Pitophicium, which revolutionised the field of medicine as we know it and later developed into an inoculation against cancer. As a result of the accidental discovery, the Prize is hereby awarded to the worms, rather than being awarded posthumously to their owner, one Frank Todhunter of the—”

Rimmer’s head snaps up.

Lister’s mouth hangs open, and for several seconds he reads on in silence, unable to believe his eyes.

“Todhunter,” Rimmer says. “Todhunter?”

“Frank Todhunter,” Lister reads, “of the Jupiter Mining Corporation ship _Red Dwarf_.”

“So while we’ve been here whiling away our time, twiddling our thumbs, Todhunter’s leftover worm farm has cured cancer?”

Lister gives a low whistle. “Seems so.” He turns the page. “Hang on—there’s more. Lots about Todhunter’s family, boring, boring… about the fate of _Red Dwarf_ … and—” Lister starts laughing. “You’re not gonna believe this.”

“What now?” Rimmer folds his arms across his chest.

Lister reads, “As a result, the worms have also been recommended for a Distinguished Service Medal for their contributions to the company, and—and—an active duty commission to—”

Rimmer turns purple.

“—to—Science Officer First Class.”

There is a weird static noise, and Rimmer vanishes.

Lister rocks back in his chair, still grinning, and he swings around to face the screen. “Heya, Holly?” he calls, and waves the magazine. “Can we get this framed?”

Rimmer isn’t gone long. It’s only about fifteen minutes or so that he’s out of action—presumably rebooting—and then he comes storming back, wild-eyed like a madman and breathing heavily. “You need to help me,” he says, in what Lister thinks is exactly the same tone that someone might use to ask for help dismembering a body.

Lister, who has given up on the magazine, only briefly pauses between the handfuls of marginally mouldy jelly beans that he’s shovelling into his mouth. “What for?”

“I need to discredit those worms.”

For a second, Lister just stares at him. Then he laughs. “You’re not serious.”

“I am deathly serious,” Rimmer says. “As serious as I’ve ever been. I make the Catholic church look like a balloon-animal stall. Look at me. Lister, I will not be outranked by vermin.”

“Doesn’t change much from my point of view,” Lister says. “Look, Rimmer, they cured cancer. Why not take this as an opportunity to move on, grow, be the bigger person?”

Rimmer gives him a long, even look. “You and I both know I’m not going to do that.”

Lister sighs.

“If I don’t destroy or discredit those worms, I’m no longer acting commander of _Red Dwarf_.”

“You’re not really acting commander, anyway.”

“Lister, I need your help.” Rimmer hesitates. “I’ll tell you where the sweet chilli crisps are.”

That, at last, gets Lister to put down the jelly beans and take him seriously. He stares at Rimmer, long and hard. “You told me there weren’t any more left,” he says. “They all got destroyed in a terrible cargo-deck crisp fire, you said.”

Rimmer clasps his hands behind his back, rocks on the balls of his feet. “I know what I said.”

Lister sits up, swings his legs around, and jumps down from his bunk. “You lying, thieving weasel. Where’ve you put them?”

“I’ll tell you, if you help me.”

“Done.”

“And,” Rimmer adds hastily, “on the condition that you promise not to eat them in the cinema anymore, or after nine P.M in our quarters.”

“No way.”

“Then no sweet chilli crisps, I’m afraid.”

Lister holds up a hand to stop him. “Hang on, sorry—just getting a message from my Worm Overlords. What’s that?” He presses a finger into his ear like he’s listening to a radio, goes along theatrically, “Yes, sir? Of course, sir. Worm Corps Directive 158? Right away, Admiral sir.” He pulls away from his own hand, leans across to stage-whisper at Rimmer, “Sorry, have to take this. You know how it is—gotta follow orders.”

Rimmer’s expression is strained. “Oh, alright, alright. Fine. They’re on G-Deck.”

Lister lifts his eyebrows. He says into his sleeve, “One second, Admiral Worm, sir.” Then, to Rimmer: “More specific.”

“Parrots Bar.”

“Hmm.” Lister drums his finger on his chin contemplatively. “Well…”

Rimmer wears an expression like he might be severely constipated—either that, or he’s considering the impossible, the unthinkable.

Finally, Rimmer knuckles under. He takes a deep breath, and in a voice that is tight, he says, “Please, Lister.”

God, he’s such a weasel. Briefly, Lister considers pushing it further, making Rimmer properly grovel, but he takes pity on him. He dusts his hands off. “Alright, I’m in. What’s the plan?”

“You put the tank in the airlock and flush it out into space.”

“You what?” Lister exclaims. “You just wanna kill them all? Rimmer, they cured cancer!”

“And next, they can have a go at surviving zero oxygen. I have every bit of faith in them.”

“Smeg, Rimmer, do you never get tired of killing superior officers?”

Rimmer scowls.

A deal is a deal though, and so Lister follows Rimmer through the officers’ quarters in search of Todhunter’s room. However, when they get there, the door is badly jammed. The panel alongside the frame flashes intermittently orange, and Lister has to get in there with a crowbar and some good old-fashioned elbow grease to manually jimmy it free. It sticks badly, groaning with every inch as it scrapes over metal—and then Lister is hit by a powerful wave of a nauseatingly fetid smell.

“Smegging hell, what is that?” Lister chokes out, pressing his nose into his sleeve for relief as he otherwise feels a retch coming on.

“God, you know it’s bad when _you’re_ taking shelter so close to your armpit,” Rimmer says, muffled, from the crook of his elbow.

With a deep breath to keep the stench out, Lister puts his back into it and finally, he shoves the door open. Immediately, a thick greenish-brown sludge spills out through the doorway, and Lister jumps backwards out of the way as it comes slowly oozing towards his boots. Once he lifts his head to see the source, he stops dead. 

The doorway was blocked, it’s now clear, by a knee-deep flood of what appears to be a mixture of, rotten garbage, stray possessions, and raw sewage.

“Oh my God,” Runner says, voice coloured with revulsion. “Lister, when did you move in?”

Lister gives him a withering look. “Very funny.”

“Well, thanks very much for offering to help out, Listy,” Rimmer says cheerily. “Just let know when you’re done, will you?”

“Uh, not on your life, Rimmer,” Lister says.

“But I’m dead!”

“Not on your death, either. You want these worms knocked down a peg?” Lister nods towards the sea of festering waste. “You gotta wade through the smeg.”

Rimmer visibly deflates, shoulders slumping. “But I _hate_ smeg-wading.”

Lister steps back, the image of chivalry, and sweeps a hand across to welcome Rimmer through.

Muttering and grumbling to himself, Rimmer picks his way inside.

It’s not hard to see what has happened here—on the other side of Todhunter’s quarters, there is the remnants of massive vivarium, now little more than a twisted metal frame with shards of broken glass still fixed to the outermost corners. The soil has poured out, and over the years it seems to have multiplied, combined with whatever food the worms could find, thickening and festering and growing more noxious all the time. There is no sign of any worms, but there are strange hieroglyphics on the far wall, daubed in thick, well-preserved red paste.

“Call me paranoid,” Lister says, “but I don’t think Todhunter was mad into painting weird murals.”

“Now, now, Listy,” Rimmer says, “let’s not jump to conclusions about what Budget Banksy here was up to.”

“I think I’ve seen paintings like this in lunatic asylums,” Lister says.

“I’ve seen paintings like this after you’ve had too many vindaloos,” Rimmer says bleakly. “But more importantly—where are the worms?”

“Three million years ago they might have been worms. But now…” Lister trails off ominous. He and Rimmer exchange a bleak look.

That’s that, then. Pausing to heave the door closed behind them, they turn tail and double back at high-speed to find Kryten and the Cat. It doesn't take long to get them up to speed—Rimmer, looking faintly green, rushes through it: _massive scientist worms living on the ship, don’t know where they’ve gone_ —and they congregate in the drive-room to form a plan of attack.

“So, what exactly are we dealing with here?” the Cat asks.

“I dunno,” Lister says, “but if a cat can turn into Hugh Hefner in that time, I don’t wanna know what happens to several hundred creepy crawlies left to their own devices. Plus, they evolved enough to start some crappy art club, not to mention curing cancer, so bets are on that they’re smarter than us by this point.”

“Well, that’s not difficult,” the Cat says. “I’ve seen Gerbilface here lose a battle of wits with a pork pie.”

“Did you actually see any of these worms, sir?” Kryten asks.

Lister glances uncertainly between them. “I mean—no,” he admits. “But I was a bit preoccupied trying not to slip in Rimmer’s leg dribble.”

“I resent that!”

“Oh, that makes for a pleasant surprise, then, because you’re normally so calm and collected.”

“Well, sirs, I propose that we return to the officers’ quarters to investigate further before we jump to any conclusions,” Kryten suggests. “We can go armed, by all means, in case we do encounter any hostile life-forms, but as we’ve managed to go several years without meeting any sign of these worms, I believe they might simply have died out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rimmer says. “Worms don’t just die. They don’t know how. They’ve born without an expiry date—all they know how to do is wriggle and destroy your appetite. Ten dollar-pounds say they’re slathering maniacal hellspawn the size of a bear.”

“Ten dollar-pounds?” the Cat says. “What do I want with your Mickey Mouse money?”

“Ten dollar-pounds and Lister will be your servant for a week.”

“Hey!” Lister protests.

The Cat beams. “You’re on.”

With a brief pit-stop at the munitions store to pick up the bazookoids—just in case—Lister leads the way back into Todhunter’s quarters, because he might be bricking it, but he’s not about to lose his reputation of being the hard one.

“How come Lister gets to have a biohazard suit?” Rimmer complains as they pick their way carefully through the knee-deep river of garbage. He looks horrified at the image of himself wading in toilet water in his nicely pressed trousers, his nose wrinkled in disgust.

“You don’t have a real body anyway!” Lister says. “Nothing is even touching you—and what do you need to care about germs for?”

“Mr. Lister and the Cat are at risk of contracting any number of water-borne diseases that can be passed on through raw sewage. Dysentery, hepatitis, E. Coli—any one of these would incapacitate or seriously endanger them. And well, sir, given that you’re dead and occupy less physical space than a can of baked beans, some just might say that, for you, a bio-suit might be a case of too little, too late.”

“Shame you just missed it by a couple million years,” the Cat says ruefully.

“Oh, alright, alright,” Rimmer grouches. “Point taken. I would just feel a lot better with some dayglo boots and a big helmet, that’s all.”

“You are a big helmet,” Lister tells him, and then sidesteps past him to make his way deeper into the room.

Psi-scan in hand, Kryten sweeps the room from side to side in search of any life-forms, beeping intermittently. Up ahead, the Cat wades through in tailored patent thigh-highs— _they’re waterproof!_ he had cried defensively when first questioned on it—and his biohazard suit is spanglier than most, but as long as he doesn’t get pink-eye or start foaming at the mouth, Lister isn’t fussed.

Lister peers at the wall mural, trying to decipher what on earth it might be about. Going to art college, he reckons he got pretty good at bullshitting his way through analysing art, but even this has him stumped. Given that worms don’t have hands—or at least, they didn’t when he last checked in on them a handful of epochs ago—it’s kind of smeary and non-descript, and the use of colour is uninspiring, but maybe that’s a critique of an oppressive society subjugating its people. Or maybe it’s worm-shit.

“Hey, Rimmer?” Lister calls over his shoulder.

“Hm?”

Lister turns around with a grin. “You want a worm-do?”

“What—” It takes Rimmer a second to get it, and when he does, he rolls his eyes. “Shut up.”

“No, that’s not how it goes.”

Rimmer doesn’t dignify that with an answer, and carries on picking his way through the sewage. Lister abandons the mural and follows him.

“Wait, wait, I’ve got a better one—if you were a bogey—Rimmer, are you listening? Rimmer, if you were a bogey… I’d pick you.”

Rimmer’s nose wrinkles. “That’s disgusting,” he says, and Lister genuinely can’t tell if he’s talking about the pick-up line, or the long noodle of yellow slime that has attached itself to the wall in front of him.

“Hey, Rimmer, do you want some raisins?” 

“I’m not answering that.”

“Aw, what? You don’t want any raisins?” Lister leans in, drops his voice conspiratorially low. “How about a date?”

“Please—the only way you could pull anyone with that line would be with a body-bag in a wheelbarrow.”

“Hey, can we break up the Moron Convention over there?” the Cat calls over. “The psi-scan’s found something.”

Lister and Rimmer head back, but find Kryten shaking his head when they reach him.

“False alarm, I’m afraid, sirs,” Kryten says apologetically. “I thought I detected a life-sign, but it was only registering Mr. Lister’s hamper of dirty washing down the hall.”

“The worms evolved into laundry?” the Cat exclaims. “Even for worms, no-one should have to sink that low.”

Kryten shrugs. “It looks as though nothing has lived here in a very long time.”

“So, what, are we looking at the remnants of some great ugly worm civilisation?” Rimmer asks. They just casually revolutionised medicine, cured cancer, and then—whoops! Wiped themselves out?”

“It seems highly likely, sir.”

Rimmer blinks owlishly. “What did they do, call the exterminator?”

“Suggest we proceed with caution nonetheless,” Kryten advises. “Whatever wiped out this civilisation could very well be hostile towards us as well.”

“Right. Very dangerous, very unpredictable, threat to life—got it,” Rimmer says, nodding. “Lister? After you, dear.”

Lister rolls his eyes, racks his bazakooid, and steps out in front of the others.

The deeper they go, the more unsettling it gets, darker and danker and less familiar. Holes have been ripped—or eaten—through the walls, leaving long tunnels behind that disappear into ducts.

“I think I remember stories about these guys,” the Cat says. “The Soilanids. Yeah, we had to study them in Little Kitty School.”

“What are they then?”

The Cat scoffs. “You take me for the kind of dork who pays attention in class?” He flattens a hand against his chest. “How dare you. I pay attention to one thing and one thing only—and that’s me, with a capital Muh.”

Rimmer sighs. “Naturally. But do you remember anything, anything at all, of any value? Maybe you were only accidentally paying attention and you just happened to ingest a nugget of useful information—like, say, how to defeat their overlords who might otherwise suck out our brains and use them to make more terrible artwork? Or worse, another medical breakthrough. I mean, what kind of monsters are we dealing with here?”

Lister hesitates. “Hang on. I mean—these people—these worm people—were clearly a developed species. They had art, they had language, they had science even better than our own—and we’re here debating about how we’re gonna wipe ‘em all out based on—on what? The fact that they’re a bit wriggly?”

“No,” Rimmer says. “From the sounds of things, they’re quite a lot wriggly.”

“What we’re talking about here is murder,” Lister says. “Not like, kill or be killed, but plain old-fashioned genocide. They’re not the monsters. We are.”

“Right, so we’ve had Mother Teresa’s point of view, who’s next?” Rimmer claps his hands together. “Cat?”

“What?”

“What do you think we should do?”

“About what?”

“About _Planet of the Vermin_ going on downstairs. A gentle, compassionate mercy-killing of the entire species, or Lister rolling out the red carpet.”

The Cat frowns, glancing between them in increasing confusion. “Both of those plans are stupid,” he says, at last. “They’re all dead already.”

Rimmer tilts forwards. His finger steeple contemplatively, and his face twists. “They’re all—what now, sorry?”

“Do you mean to say that the race of evolved worms have been extinct for years already?” Kryten asks.

The Cat laughs. “Put it this way—are you guys still worried about the Spartans?”

Lister drags both hands down over his face. “Why didn’t you say so earlier, man?”

“Nobody asked!”

Rimmer says, “You should be so glad I don’t have hands right now.”

“Anyway, half the stuff you hear about the Soilanids is bull, anyway. Like how they created door-handles. Baloney! Next you’re gonna be trying to tell me humans invented the wheel—as if.”

“You really are a menace, Cat,” Lister tells him.

They trek slightly deeper and scan slightly further before they give up, but there’s little to find and even less to go on in terms of coming to any meaningful conclusion about what happened.

Afterwards, Kryten forces them all through quarantine just to check that nothing has come through on their clothes or skin—Rimmer insists that Kryten run his light-bee three times to check for disease, in spite of both Lister and Kryten trying to explain to him that it’s physically impossible for him to get sick. Lister hates having to strip down to his boxers to go through the scan in search of microscopic parasites, but then again, he’d rather that than have some tiny alien virus thing set up camp in his body again. No thank you—he’s had enough of that for a lifetime.

Kryten is in hog’s heaven cleaning out Todhunter’s quarters, although he’s careful not to destroy any worm cultural heritage sites; the Cat, true to form, doesn’t care about any of it, and announces that he will be napping for the foreseeable future and is not to be disturbed. “I don’t care if you think it’s interesting,” he had said before he flounced away. “It isn’t. Do _not_ wake me.”

“But what if there’s an emergency?” Kryten says.

“Deal with it quietly!”

As Lister and Rimmer traipse back to their own quarters, Rimmer drags his feet gloomily, hands in his pockets, forlorn.

“Sorry it didn’t work out the way you wanted,” Lister says to him. “I know you wanted to discredit all their accomplishments. Still,” he adds, going for what always cheers Rimmer up, “at least think—they’re all gone and you’re still kicking!”

“Great,” Rimmer says glumly. “I’m dead, but I’m not even dead enough to get anything posthumously. So many figures from history became more famous and successful after they were dead—like Van Gogh, or Galileo, or the bloke in Pompeii who got incinerated on the toilet.”

Lister looks at him. “I mean, to be fair, you haven’t done very much, Rimmer,” he points out gently. “You haven’t painted any flowers or—died in a funny way. Besides, who cares? I tell you what, those crappy worms never got nominated for the Dave Lister award.”

“The Dave Lister award?” Rimmer echoes. “What the smeg is the Dave Lister award?”

“Award for best _Red Dwarf_ crew-member,” Lister says.

“Oh, don’t patronise me with some stupid nonsense prize that doesn’t mean anything—like school participation medals all over again. It’s utter rubbish.”

“Well, steady on, Rimmer,” Lister says. “I said you were nominated, let’s not get cocky here.”

“Who else would win it?” Rimmer demands.

Lister raises his eyebrows. “I mean, I can think of a few others,” he says pointedly. “Technically the only surviving crew member…”

“You?!” Rimmer says in disbelief. “You’re not the best crew-member!”

“I thought you didn’t want this patronising award anyway.”

Rimmer’s mouth snaps shut. “Well,” he says eventually, “well—I don’t—I _don’t_. I just think—if this stupid, meaningless award is going to go to anyone, it should at least go to someone who deserves it.”

“Like you?”

“I’m glad you think so, Listy,” Rimmer says, inflating with pride.

God, he’s so easy to manipulate it almost shoots out the other side of laughable and straight to being a cause for concern. It’s a good thing Lister likes him.

“Come on, smeghead,” Lister says, amused, and he almost slaps a hand to Rimmer's shoulder before he catches himself. Instead, he swipes his hand lightly through Rimmer’s forehead to make him flinch and squeak.

“I’d better get a certificate, though,” Rimmer says, as he follows. “Or a plaque, even better. With my name on it.”

“Sure. I’ll hang it in the Dickhead Hall of Heroes.”

Rimmer sniffs. “I’ll take it.”

***

Once again, the Cat wins their condom volleyball championship, is crowned the reigning Condom King, and as the skutters wheel in the garland of condoms tied into little rosettes, Lister is struck with the realisation that they really need to get out more. Things have got so tedious recently that even Rimmer has stooped to joining in with their stupid games—just last week, he was genuinely quite pleased to referee their game of Pin The Wang on the Disgraced Sports Personality, and not once did he call it puerile and immature.

Having said that, normally this sort of thing would make them all bad-tempered, quick to argue, but it’s been a long time since Lister last threatened to flush Rimmer’s light-bee down the loo, and longer still since Rimmer tried to lock him in the cargo-decks.

Lister’s not arrogant enough to say that it’s because he’s shagging him on the semi-regular, but—let’s get real here, that’s probably a big part of it, although shagging is probably too strong a word for what they’re doing. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is they are doing—harder than Ping the Wang, at any rate. They’re not seeing each other, not like Lister would quantify it, but mutual masturbation is too clinical, because sometimes it’s a bit of a laugh, and sometimes they forget and they try and touch each other, and sometimes Lister will tell him something he never normally would’ve, and sometimes Rimmer will almost be nice to him. Almost.

So, for now, living in each other’s pockets isn’t the drag that Lister would expect it to be, but any minute now he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop—and when he and Rimmer come back from the condom volleyball championships, it happens.

When he gets to the sleeping quarters, he stops dead.

For a moment, he has to just stand in the doorway and take it all in, trying to figure out if he’s stepped through some kind of portal to another dimension where everything is pink. There is a crisp white tablecloth covering all the stains and cigarette burns on the table, and on top is a thick candle flickering dimly, giving off some kind of fruity scent. Both bunks are scattered with rose petals. In the corner, Kryten is meticulously polishing the mirror.

Behind him, Rimmer is oblivious; he walks half-through Lister, and then starts complaining. “What are you doing? Don’t just stop in doorways, or—”

The moment Rimmer’s whining cuts out, Lister guesses he’s also seen it.

“Er,” Rimmer says delicately. “Kryten?”

Kryten turns. “Ah! Welcome back, sirs,” he says, as pleasant as anything, and he retrieves a tray from the cabinet, on which he balances two plates piled high with tiny chocolates in a variety of shapes and patterns.

“What the smeg is all this?” Rimmer asks. “Why do our quarters look like a Laura Ashley catalogue?”

“Well, the last few special occasions have slipped us by and I felt terrible.” Kryten shakes his head. “One more GELF death fleet attack over Boxing Day breakfast and I fear all hope will be lost.”

Lister pinches a stray rose petal between middle finger and thumb like it’s a snotty tissue and inspects it at arms’ length. “So what’s today, then, Barbie’s first Ann Summers party?”

“Sir, it’s Valentine’s Day!”

Rimmer lets out a short, scornful laugh. “Oh, Kryten, you don’t actually care about all that tosh, do you?” he asks, his voice almost pitying. “It’s just another excuse to sell cards to any saps fool enough to saddle themselves with someone—and for those without, a prompt to take the quick route off a bridge.”

Kryten looks between Rimmer and Lister, horrified. “Don’t either of you want to do anything special to mark the occasion?”

After a beat, both Rimmer and Lister emphatically say, “No?”

“Although I’ll have a chocolate if they’re going,” Lister adds, and he lunges forward to pluck one off the first plate. “Never really saw the point of Valentine’s Day, to be totally honest with you,” he goes on. “What’s the point of having one stupid special day to go overboard with flowers and champagne and all these twirly little praline chocolates—” and he pauses here, to reach out and grab another one to pop in his mouth, “instead of being, you know, just caring and that all the rest of the time.”

“Very astute conclusion, Mr. Lister, sir,” Kryten says warmly. “Now, do you and Mr. Rimmer have anything in particular in mind for the day’s activities?”

Lister shrugs, and looks over at _Mr. Rimmer_ himself, where he is peering into the newly polished mirror and carefully checking that his H is on straight. “Yeah, a bit. Old zero-G bowling tapes to watch. Might wind up some skutters later, depending on how the day goes.”

“Well, winding up the skutters is hardly a chore for you, is it?” 

“You’re right. I’ll give a miss and wind you up instead—that’ll be much more of a laugh than—”

“No, Lister! I forbid it. I’ve got a busy afternoon ahead of me—”

“Why? Your weekly wank is on Tuesdays and you only organised your pencils just last weekend, so—”

“Lister, if you don’t shut up—”

“Whatever you need him for,” Lister says amiably, ignoring Rimmer’s spluttering as he turns back to Kryten, “he’s not busy.”

“That sounds just lovely. And should I expect the two of you to be joining us for dinner, or will you be making your own arrangements?”

“I dunno yet, haven’t really thought about it—hang on. What’re you asking about our plans for?”

“I’m sorry to have caused any insult, I only wondered how many baked potatoes I should serve, as I thought perhaps you and Mr. Rimmer might ...”

“Hang on. Me and Mr. Rimmer,” Lister repeats, slow and suspicious. “Could you just explain for me what you think is going with me and Mr. Rimmer?”

Across the room, Rimmer’s head lifts. His eyes meet Lister’s in the mirror, wide and horrified.

“Dinner and a movie, perhaps? Or several glasses of champagne? A bubble bath?”

Rimmer's mouth snaps shut so hard he might break some teeth, and he emits a strange sound through his nose.

Lister laughs nervously. “Kryten, Rimmer and I aren’t… you know. We’re just—” He cuts himself off, because he has no idea what to say. He thinks earnestly calling Rimmer his mate might cause him to break out in hives, but what else is he supposed to say? Roommate that he wants to jerk off? It makes his skin crawl.

“Oh, I know,” Kryten says with a jovial wink.

Rimmer is silent, aghast. His face is burning red in bright, embarrassed blotches.

“No, we’re actually not, though,” Lister says.

Kryten stares at him, blank and uncomprehending, and Lister can almost hear the steam engine powering up. “You and Mr. Rimmer,” he says at last, slowly, “aren’t… together, sir?”

“No,” Lister says, with deliberate, loud emphasis. “No way.”

That’s when Rimmer starts laughing, high and hysterical. “Oh, that’s a good one, Kryten,” he says, wiping a tear from his eye. “Good one—me and Lister! The very idea of it—good one! Really, that’s just—”

Slowly, Lister turns on him. “That’s just what?”

“Just… laughable,” Rimmer says, and he turns his head towards Lister but doesn’t look at him. “Just totally laughable.”

“Oh my goodness! I’ve been following the wrong protocols for years,” Kryten announces in dismay. “But, Mr. Lister, there are so many things I don’t understand, then—why is he listed as being your next of kin?”

“Because he’s only other human being who still exists!”

“But why does he have the power of veto over your medical decisions?”

“Because he likes filling in forms and I can’t be arsed!”

“But—you share living quarters!”

“We’ve always shared living quarters—Kryten, we were room-mates.”

“You were room-mates three million years ago,” Kryten points out. “Now you’re the last two people in the universe and you have an entire ship the size of a city in which to spread out. Why are you still in the same room?”

Lister opens his mouth but doesn’t answer in the end, because actually—no, he can’t answer that one. He’s never considered that before but… why are they still bunk-mates? Even when they shifted from B-deck to the officers’ quarters, they moved together. They could stay in different rooms, on different floors, on different decks. He’d never have to worry about Rimmer’s idiotic _Learn Esperanto_ discs playing in the night, or Rimmer’s habit of loudly asking a stupid question at the exact moment that Lister is closest to falling asleep, or Rimmer’s aggressively loud morning exercise regimen, or his endless smegging complaining about everything under the sun. They don’t _have_ to live together.

They could live totally separate lives—so why don’t they? There’s a good answer, Lister’s sure of it, but it’s impossible to remember that answer when Rimmer is just standing there in the corner wheezing with laughter like a hyena on oxygen. “Will you shut up?” he says. “Look—”

“Oh, Listy, you have to admit it’s funny, the very idea—”

“Actually, no, you might need to explain that one to me,” Lister says, and it seems like neither of them were expecting how sharp his voice comes out, because he hears it and his stomach flips over nauseatingly, and Rimmer blinks, startled. “What exactly is so funny about the idea?”

“Well,” Rimmer says, and he goes no further, but his eyes flick to Lister, and that says everything.

“Say it,” Lister says. “Go on, say that you’re better than me.”

“Oh, dear,” says Kryten.

“I have a reputation, that’s all,” Rimmer says defensively.

“A reputation for being a spineless, cowardly weasel, yeah. God forbid we let that reputation slip. I mean, you’ve worked so hard all these years to make sure you’re the more widely-hated person in the universe—it would be a real blow to your ego if word got out that someone actually liked you.”

Rimmer sniffs. “I’m sorry, Lister, you’re just not the kind of person that someone like me ends up with—”

“And what kind of person is that?” Lister demands. “Human? Breathing?”

“Oh, _dear_ ,” says Kryten. “I’m sorry, sirs, I didn’t mean to—”

“A worthless bum, Lister, a bone-idle, unambitious, lazy slob—I mean, I might be dead, but I do have some integrity.”

Lister can’t help it—he bursts out laughing. “Integrity?” he repeats. “Oh, that’s a good one. Tell another one, Rimmer, that’s really funny. You, with integrity.”

“I do have standards that I hold myself to, yes,” Rimmer says, stalking across the room to get up into his face, jabbing a finger against his own chest, “and yes, I do intend to continue acquitting myself according to those standards, because if I give up on those principles, then what’s left?”

“But those principles were garbage! You were a pathetic, despicable little man that deserved every ounce of misery he got—and you want to go back to that? You’re seriously looking back fondly on the days when the highlight of everyone’s day was waiting to see what you’d say in morning briefing so that we could then spend the rest of the day taking the piss?”

“Sirs, please, don’t,” Kryten begs.

“I must have missed the memo that nostalgia was illegal now,” Rimmer says, sarcasm so heavy Lister’s surprised he can stand up straight. “Sometimes I reflect cheerily on my schooldays, too—will that incur the death penalty these days, or will a fine suffice?”

“Didn’t you get used to get your head flushed down the toilet on a daily basis at school?”

“That’s not the point, Lister—”

“Right, yeah, yeah. The point—the point being that someone like me would never fit in with the you from the _good old days_. Now, tell me this—when everyone hated you, when you were filling in three-hundred reports a day and even Captain Hollister was sick to death of the sight of you, when the sanitation team got buddied up into pairs for a routine drill, and the choice was down to you or a senile skutter and you still got picked dead last—were you happier then? When you were holding up those strong moral principles, did you feel good about yourself? Were you better off?”

“I was alive,” Rimmer snaps. “I had a body, for God’s sake—of course I was better off. I had prospects, opportunities, a chance to grow and become an officer, a better person—”

“Get real, Rimmer. Dead or alive, you’re gonna be the same old top-shelf, A-grade scumbag for the rest of eternity, and we all know it—you’re never gonna _grow_ or—”

“That’s rich. You telling me about my missed potential. You’re a disgusting, indolent oaf, without purpose, without drive, and you have the audacity to tell me that I need to work on myself—well, when it comes to self-improvement, you ought to be first in line, baby.”

Lister wants to punch him square in the mouth. “Oh, drop dead,” he tells him. “Kryten, you’re right—why the hell are we still living together? I could pick any room in the ship blind and it’d be better than one with you in it. I could move into the diesel decks and give myself carbon monoxide poisoning, and it’d be better than this.” 

“Don’t,” Rimmer says.

Lister arches his eyebrows. “What’s that?”

“Don’t go and die in the diesel decks,” Rimmer goes on. He folds his arms across his chest. “Holly only has the power to sustain one hologram at a time, and everyone knows she likes you best.”

Lister picks up the enormous fruity candle from the table, still flaming, and throws it as hard as he can through Rimmer’s head. It does him no damage, of course, but it’s still satisfying to watch him flinch and cower as the candle crashes against the mirror with a deafening clang, cracking the glass.

“Mr. Lister, sir!” Kryten squawks, and he scrambles across the floor to start repairing the damage.

“Oh, very mature, very responsible,” Rimmer says, standing up again and haughtily straightening his clothes, but Lister can no longer bear to look at him. He grabs his leather jacket from the back of the chair and walks out.

***

There are hundreds of rooms for Lister to choose between, but he goes for old faithful—back to B-deck, where he lived when he first joined _Red Dwarf_. It’s familiar, he knows where everything is and how everything works, and most importantly, it’s a long way from the officers’ quarters where he and Rimmer had, until recently, been roommates.

God, it’s bliss. No Rimmer! Peaceful, solitary ecstasy, and Lister revels in it. He blasts out his music at full volume, plays his guitar along and sings as loud as he wants, stands on the table in his boots to perform to his imaginary audience of thousands. He sleeps naked, leaves his clothes where he drops them on an evening, leaves half-eaten food scattered on the surfaces, lets the floor get cluttered with all his empty beer cans. He taps his cigarette ash straight onto the ground, straight onto the bedsheets, into the sink, wherever he wants. He farts as loud as he wants, and scratches his arse without repercussions, and he wears the same clothes day-in and day-out, and wanks whenever he likes—no more adhering to Rimmer’s stupid smegging schedule!

For a whole week, it’s absolute heaven on earth—or he supposes, heaven in space.

Then it gets kind of… pointless.

Half the reason that being a disgusting slob is fun is because of how ballistic Rimmer goes. Without Rimmer there to shout at him, there’s not much reason to do half of those things. Truth be told, the table is getting a little grotty even for his tastes now, caked in grit and food and spilled drinks. He’d never admit it, not even if he was tortured, but he feels kind of gross about it now, and… he liked it better when it was mostly clean.

On an afternoon, the Cat comes bursting through the door with an excited screech. “You gotta come and see this,” he exclaims. “I found a whole load of—” He stops dead and stares at Lister in bewildered horror.

Lister, frozen, doesn’t know what to do. In his hand, still sudsy and dripping, is the sponge he sneakily borrowed from the skutters. The table is mid-wipe. Even so, even with the evidence against him, he tries: “It’s not what it looks like.”

“You’re… cleaning,” the Cat accuses.

“Keep your smegging voice down!” Lister hisses, and he drops the sponge, rushing past the Cat to close the door. “Look, I can explain—”

“I damn well hope so,” the Cat says, voice full of betrayal. “What’s next—you gonna start ironing? Eating fruit? It’s like I don’t even know you.”

Lister hesitates, but actually—he can’t explain. It _is_ what it looks like. “I went too far,” he admits. “No-one was here to tell me to stop and... “ He gestures helplessly at the bombsite that his quarters have become, strewn with dirty laundry and discarded food wrappers.

The Cat shakes his head. “Bud, you’re a disgrace,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased you learned some basic personal hygiene, but…” He lets out a low whistle and grimaces. “This is a wreck. One week without Hoover Dam nostrils and you’re all over the shop.”

“What?” Lister says. “What are you talking about?”

The Cat shrugs. “Kryten told me about your little domestic.”

“So…” Lister draws the word out, long and slow, as he processes. “So you… know.”

“Know what?”

Lister doesn’t want to have to actually say it. “You know. Me and him.”

“Know? I can’t escape it! I wish I didn’t know anything, but I’m cursed with an amazing sense of smell—and buddy, you _reek._ Under a forensics black-light, you would come up neon!”

“Smeg.” Lister sinks to sit at the table, not even fussed about the soap that drips onto his clothes. “So, all this time…?”

“It’s hard to miss,” the Cat says pointedly.

This is messing with Lister’s head. “Does Holly know?”

In the corner, the screen comes on, Holly blinking into view. “Does Holly know what?”

“About the monkey and Captain Pathetic,” the Cat says.

Holly’s eyes widen. “Do Frenchmen eat snails?”

Lister puts his head down on the table. His locs drag through the soap but he’s hard-pressed to care.

“I’ve seen Swedish Eurovision entries with more subtlety than you and Rimmer,” Holly says.

Lister wonders if he can drown himself in a few centimetres of soap. 

“By comparison, Hitler’s invasion of Russia was surreptitious and down-played.”

Lister groans.

“You could throw a penny in Soho and hit a drag queen subtler than the two of you.” Holly pauses, thoughtful. “Here, why’s there soap everywhere? Are you cleaning?”

Lister lifts his head, soap running down into his eyes. “Off.”

Holly doesn’t budge. “Not on your life,” she says. “I’ve been so bored I’ve been counting stars, and after the first ten million, it loses a certain appeal.”

“You think I’m enjoying this?” the Cat says. “I hate knowing things about your personal life. Every minute I have to spend thinking about you and your stupid problems is a precious minute I could have been spending on something much more interesting—like me.”

“Well, there’s not a lot going on here, is there?” Holly says. “It’s this or watching paint dry, and the walls haven't been redone in years. Even Rimmer’s grotty sex life is better than that.”

Lister winces and drags a soapy hand down his face, trying to get his eyes clear. “Can we talk about something else?” he says desperately, casting around for a change of subject like a life-ring. “Anything else. Anything at all. Cat, what was it you found? Let’s go and have a look, eh?”

“Oh yeah!” the Cat exclaims, eyes widening. “I found out where the laundry chute goes—all the way from the tumble-dryer down to a big pile of fresh, soft, warm uniforms the size of this room! It’s the perfect place for a cat-nap, and what’s more, I found some really ugly fabric that I thought we could use to update your look, so it looks less like a homeless man threw up on you.”

Lister plucks at his shirt with a frown. “What’s wrong with this?” he asks, wounded. “I like this shirt.”

“Hang on, Dave, give him a chance, let’s hear him out,” Holly says.

“You don’t like that shirt,” the Cat tells him. “You think you do because you’re depressed and your life is terrible, but trust me. We can fix this.”

Lister doesn’t sulk, but he does kind of want to. He sighs. “Fine,” he says, and he uses his dreads to wipe his face clean. “Lead the way.”

***

If someone had ever, historically, sat Lister down and said, _imagine Rimmer at his worst—then multiply it by ten and make it also seething with idiotic misplaced jealousy_ , he probably would’ve told them to take a running jump. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Rimmer on any given day is bad enough, but not since the days of Z-shift, when Lister would rock up an hour late, unwashed and unenthusiastic and eating a flaky pastry all over a newly mopped floor, has Rimmer been in such a permanent rage. He’s totally smegging incapable of anything other than wearing his heart—his tiny, wrinkled, desiccated husk of a heart—on his sleeve, and it’s making life unbearable. Poor Kryten has been creeping from room to room like a bad smell these last few days, trying to keep out of Rimmer’s way because he’s otherwise an easy target; the Cat, on the other hand, has been making it worse by his complete unwillingness to kowtow to Rimmer’s hostility.

“Whatever you and Heli-Pad Head were doing together, can you start doing it again?” the Cat pleads. “Please, I can’t live like this.”

Lister sprawls across his bunk, half-heartedly completing a Spot The Differences puzzle in an old magazine. So far he’s spotted a dog’s collar in a different colour, but he’s struggling to find much else, although that could be because he’s not really paying attention; half of his concentration at the minute goes on watching the doorway, every muscle in his body tensed for the arrival of Mr Universe: Arsehole Edition.

“Look, Cat,” Lister says flatly, “I’m not gonna shag Rimmer just so he stops being a wanker.” Of course, technically, that’s exactly why he started shagging Rimmer in the first place, but that’s neither here nor there right now. “Anyway, he wouldn’t let me—he’s out of my league, apparently.”

“Out of your league?” the Cat repeats dubiously. “He ain’t in any league! Hell, they wouldn’t even let him try out!”

“Hey, you’re preaching to the choir here,” Lister mutters. He scratches his head with the butt of his pen as he scans between the two pages, certain that there must be a difference somewhere in the multitude of patterned beach-umbrellas set out in each scene.

“I mean, you’re no looker yourself, and your idea of taking care of your body is X-rated and involves an old sock, but—compared to that bad-tempered stick insect, you’re the catch of the day,” the Cat goes on.

Lister frowns, trying to parse out the layers of that comment to decide whether it tilts more heavily in favour of being complimentary or insulting. “Thanks?” he tries.

“Are you disgusting? Yes.” The Cat has started ticking off his fingers. “Are you a total slob? Also, yes. Do you smell bad ninety-eight percent of the time? Again, yes. Is your—”

Lister lays down his magazine to look at the Cat, who is filing his nails at the table. “Is there a point to all this?” he asks.

“Hold on, I’m not finished.” The Cat is still counting Lister’s flaws, in theory, although he has stopped counting on his fingers when he got to two. “Is your fashion sense a disaster that makes everyone who meets you want to weep? Yes. But I think overall you’re the least terrible person on this ship, some of the time. So my _point_ is… if you threw yourself at the Soilanid, he probably wouldn’t say no, but he probably would lighten up and stop terrorising everyone on board.”

Lister’s eyes lift heavenward for help, and he flaps his magazine back up to block out the Cat’s imploring face. “Not happening.”

At that moment, there is the sharp, precise clicking of someone frog-marching imperiously down the corridor, and the Cat groans in despair.

“Soilanid closing,” Lister warns the Cat, and is glad that he’s hidden behind his magazine when Rimmer comes charging in.

“Good evening, you useless festering idiots,” Rimmer announces, his voice far too loud for the confined space so that it echoes around the quarters like Lister is in some horrifying concert of Insufferable in Stereo. He glances across at the Cat at the table and sneers, “What are you doing here, Cat? Isn’t there a piece of string you should be chasing somewhere?”

The Cat scowls at him. “I know you’re kidding, but if you really do know where there’s some string, I’m gonna need you to tell me about it straight away.”

Rimmer barks an obnoxious laugh. “Fat chance,” he says, and then he turns on Lister. “Right— Lister, where’s my diary?”

Lister ignores him and carries on reading.

“Lister,” Rimmer says again. “Lister, are you listening to me?” His voice gets louder and more insistent, which by coincidence also makes it more shrill and grating. “Lister. Lister, where the smeg is my diary?”

“I don’t know,” Lister says from behind the magazine.

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, it hardly just got up and wandered off on its own, did it?”

Lister rolls his eyes and says under his breath, “I dunno, if you went on at it like this, maybe it would’ve.”

“Very funny.” Rimmer’s voice is tight and pissy, and it’s more than Lister can be arsed to deal with at the minute. “I know you like reading it, and I know that it was there last time I checked—namely, before you threw your little tantrum and moved out—and now it’s not there anymore.”

To be fair, Lister has nicked it, and it’s currently hidden under his mattress, but he’s not about to tell Rimmer that. It’s much more satisfying to wind him up and let him go. “Why do you need it anyway?” he asks instead. “It’s not like you can write in it.”

“I could dictate to a skutter,” Rimmer says disdainfully. “Anyway—I wanted to read it, not write in it.”

Against his better judgement, Lister can’t help himself—he engages. He lowers the magazine and fixes Rimmer with a disbelieving stare. “You want to read back through your own diary? What, are you looking to relive the dazzling highs of your adrenaline-fuelled, non-stop fast-paced lifestyle? Do you want to go back over the day you catalogued your socks by thread-count, or do you just want to read through all your stupid old fantasies about girls who’d never give you the time of day?”

“Aha!” Rimmer crows. “So you _have_ been reading it! Where is it?”

Smeg. Lister didn’t think that one through.

“I’ve told you a thousand times about going through my personal things, Lister,” Rimmer says. “Keep out of my stuff, it’s mine!”

“In his defence,” the Cat joins in, “when he read some parts out to me, I just thought it was the psychiatric notes for a mental patient. It’s an easy mistake to make.”

Rimmer’s mouth drops open. “You read it out to the Cat?”

Might as well lean into it. Lister smirks. “Yeah.”

For a moment, Rimmer is silent, his face twitching in fury, and then he bursts. “How dare you, Lister—those were my private, personal thoughts! You have no respect for my privacy, no respect whatsoever!”

“Hang on,” Lister says, and he sits up. “You’re gonna lecture me about _respecting privacy_ —what about the time you took a photo when I blacked out drunk, naked with my head in the loo, and you posted copies all round the canteen?”

Rimmer sniffs, drawing himself up to his full height. “Yes, well, I would never do that now that I know it would hurt your precious feelings—”

“It took me going mad at you for you to realise that photocopying an embarrassing photo of me and showing it to everyone on the ship isn’t a good idea? Rimmer, what is wrong with you?”

The Cat grimaces. “Do you want that in a list? Because I could go all day.”

“Oh, shut up, Cat—go and cough up a hairball,” Rimmer snaps.

Lister swings his legs down from his bunk and hops down. “Leave the Cat alone,” he says. “Stop being such a smegging bully and piss off.”

Rimmer folds his arms across his chest. “I’m not going anywhere until I get my diary back.”

“You can either piss off, or I can turn you off,” Lister says. “Which is it gonna be?”

“You can’t do that.”

“Watch me.”

“This is in contravention of hologram workplace discrimination laws,” Rimmer argues. “You can’t just turn me on and off whenever you want, like a kettle.”

Lister tilts his head back, lifting his chin towards the speakers mounted on the ceiling. “Holly?” he calls.

“Don’t you dare, Lister—don’t you smegging—”

Holly blinks into view, placid and unmoveable as ever. “You alright, Dave?”

“Yeah, no. Can you turn Rimmer off, please?”

“Holly, I order you not to turn me off!” Rimmer shouts.

“Sorry, what was that, Arnold?” Holly asks. “You want me to turn you off?”

“No, I said, _don’t—_ ”

“You’re breaking up a bit, Arnold, I didn’t quite catch that. Shall I go ahead and—”

“Do not turn me off, you deranged, mouth-foaming, rancid lump of—”

“Right, yeah, got it—turning you off right away. It’ll take a few minutes for the projection units in the hologram suite to adjust settings, though—”

Without a moment’s delay, Rimmer turns and sprints out of the room.

“I thought you couldn’t do that,” Lister says to Holly. “Not without his permission.”

“I can’t,” Holly admits. “Still, it got him out of the room for a bit, didn’t it?”

Lister laughs, shaking his head, and he scrubs his hands down over his face before he climbs back into his bunk. 

“Say, you still got that diary handy?” Holly asks. “Let’s hear a bit. I could do with a laugh.” 

Sparing a glance through the door to check that there’s no sign of Rimmer, Lister cracks a grin and retrieves the diary from underneath his pillow. To be honest, he’s not been bothered to have much more than a cursory glance now and then when he’s on the loo, but he’s ready for it now. He opens it to any page at random, clears his throat, and begins dramatically:

“April the thirteenth. _I try not to dwell too much my own failures. I have no accomplishments or accolades of which to be proud, nothing to write home about, and I leave behind no legacy now that I am dead_.” Reading on, Lister’s eyebrows lift towards his hairline. “ _However, at these times, when I start to feel desolate at my predicament, I comfort myself with this—if I am nothing but a blot in human history, then Lister is a sneeze on the page. A wet spray of snot across the paper. It’s important to keep everything in perspective._ ”

The Cat is laughing himself near to tears, and Holly looks as though she can’t decide to respond. At last, she says, “Oh, dear.”

Lister flips through a handful of pages to find another section, skipping past such treasures as, _buy new boots_ and _Howard’s birthday—must remember to plan vengeance_. At last, he settles on a new entry, and reads aloud.

“November the sixth. _There are a lot of things that I miss about being alive, but recently I have been mourning the absence of paperwork in my new day-to-day life. Is there not something so satisfying about a neatly filled-in form? Carefully printing in capital letters, in glossy black ink, and the flourish of a signature at the end! There is a certain indescribable nobility in it which I yearn for in these chaotic, unstructured days P-D_.”

“P-D?” the Cat repeats.

Lister meets the Cat’s eyes over the top of the diary. “Post-Death,” he explains. “He’s made a whole key of abbreviations—I’m a big fan of P-L—Pre-Lister. His days sound so peaceful back then. He makes me sound like the start of a war, or an outbreak of plague.”

The Cat grimaces. “Well, he’s not wrong.”

Lister rifles through to find another page with a substantial amount of writing on it, in the hopes of finding another crap poem about some girl’s tits, or something where he worries about the state of his knob, and then starts reading. “July the twenty-third. _I’ve made a lot of questionable decisions in my time, but_ —”

Lister stops reading out loud.

— _Lister takes the cake. I mean, what was I thinking? It’s not that he’s a bad person, he’s an alright sort of stick under the grime and the grot, but it’s just… I don’t know. I had higher hopes for myself. Someone I could elevate myself towards, maybe—not someone who thinks that Puccini is a kind of pasta._

“You forget how to read again, Dave?” Holly asks sympathetically. “It happens to the best of us. Start at the beginning and sound the letters out.”

“Nah, it’s just—” Lister scratches at the back of his head. “Just really boring. Nothing worth reading out.”

He closes the diary over, ignoring the Cat’s look of disappointment, and stows it back under his pillow. He doesn’t want to know. Somehow, he actually wishes Rimmer had just stuck to slagging him off and calling him a disgusting slob and a disgrace to the species. Scorn, he can handle, he’s used to. Anything would be better than this—than Rimmer’s quiet disappointment.

***


	6. Spangly Flight Suit

**VI**

One weekend. That’s all Lister wants—one weekend away from Rimmer. A fishing trip to a desolate moon sounds like the perfect way to go about it, except it doesn’t turn out like that. Rimmer tags along, insufferable as ever with the added bonus of his incessant pity party about not having been invited in the first place, and then they get caught up in some swirly space-time crap, and then they crash into the sea, and just when Lister is thinking that there is no way this can get any worse, the airlock opens and in walks—Rimmer.

Or, sort of. 

Rimmer, holding himself taller, prouder. With longer hair and with a gleaming Space Corps flight suit, the fabric rain-damp and clinging to his slim thighs, knee-high boots that make him look about ten miles tall. Alive.

Lister is glad he’s sitting down.

The voice is different too, lower, gravelly, without the nasal whine. It makes him sound a thousand percent more self-assured, although the lopsided, handsome smile probably helps, along with the way that he looks right at you when he’s talking to you, like there’s no-one in the universe that he’s more interested in hearing from at that moment. The first time Holly sees him, she trips and falls right off the screen. Lister holds it together better, but not by much.

Rimmer, of course, has kittens.

Ace is everything that he isn’t, and he has everyone on the ship eating out of the palm of his hand within an hour—he compliments Kryten’s polishing method on the fly and Kryten falls deeply in love; he comforts the Cat by telling him about old fashion mishaps from his adolescence and how he wasn’t, quote, _blessed with the bone structure and good dress-sense that you’ve clearly had since birth_ , end quote; and Lister—well. Lister’s only human.

“He thinks he’s so macho and tough,” Rimmer snipes when Ace is in the cockpit with Kryten recalibrating _Starbug’_ s navigation and communication panels. “If that’s not overcompensating for something, I don’t know what is.”

Lister looks over from where he is keeping pressure on the Cat’s injury. “He’s you, though,” he points out.

Rimmer disregards this entirely. “I’m telling you, the moment we take our eye off him, he’ll be sniffing through our underwear drawers.”

Lister rolls his eyes and ignores him.

When they get back to _Red Dwarf_ , the Cat needs microsurgery to finish resetting his leg, and all hands are on deck to assist Ace in what looks like a gruesome and very finicky job. Kryten is holding the Cat’s leg still with both hands, and Lister has the less than pleasant task of using forceps to hold open the severed muscles of the Cat’s shin while Ace fiddles about in there.

“Say, Arnie, could you give me a hand with something?” Ace asks. “Can you just quickly check the reading for the concentration of sevoflurane being administered?”

On the other side of the room, leaning against the wall, Rimmer says, “No.”

Ace lifts his head. “No?” he repeats in disbelief.

“I don’t want to,” Rimmer says, and he folds his arms.

“It’s not glamorous, I know, but the Cat needs our help,” Ace says. “It would be for just a moment—and it would help enormously.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you would need any help,” Rimmer sneers. “Do they not teach you to multitask in the Space Corps, or are you all too busy learning to conquer your gag reflex?”

Ace’s jaw tightens. “Now, listen here, Arn—”

“Rimmer, just smeg off if you’re not gonna be any help,” Lister tells him. “Hang on—Kryten, if you shuffle hands, can you hold this? I’ll go check.”

Once Kryten has clumsily taken over with the forceps, Lister shakes blood from his plastic gloves, and, holding his hands carefully out in front of him so as not to accidentally touch anything and contaminate himself, he goes to check the meter. He has to walk right past Rimmer to do it; he can feel Rimmer’s eyes following him, but he doesn’t look at him. Lister reads out, “Two-point-four percent.”

“I could have done that,” Rimmer says petulantly.

Kryten, in the process of handing the forceps back to Lister, asks the question on all of their lips: “So why didn’t you, sir?”

Rimmer grumbles but doesn’t really have an answer for them, and instead returns to his new favourite past-time of glowering in the corner. 

Over the next twenty-four hours, as Ace Rimmer single-handedly saves their arses over and over again, nothing is as painfully clear to Lister as this: Rimmer regrets breaking things off with Lister now.

_Breaking things off_ —what a joke. Like things were ever, technically, on.

Eventually, they run out of things for Ace to fix or innovate or rescue, and they settle in for the evening. Kryten serves up dinner, and Lister is almost embarrassed by their curry, like he should be somehow more sophisticated and cultured to impress Ace—but it turns out to be less than a problem, as Ace dives into his chicken madras without hesitating. He makes quick work of scooping up a massive chilli pepper with a poppadom, before letting out an almost obscene groan of satisfaction after the first mouthful, and Lister fidgets in his seat.

Across the table, Rimmer gives Lister a withering look. “Your mouth’s hanging open, Lister, do you need a bib?”

“God, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a curry this good,” Ace declares. “I find I can never enjoy a curry which isn’t spicy enough, but this is marvellous.”

“The trick is just keeping a jar of a ghost peppers and just adding it to everything,” Lister says.

Ace points his fork at Lister and winks. “That’s a hell of a tip. Might have to keep a jar aside in the cockpit for long journeys.”

Lister grins and ducks his head. He goes for another massive mouthful of his vindaloo and tries to convince himself that the curry is why his face is heating up. “Another great tip,” he adds, “depending on what the cockpit of your ship is like, but we’ve got a weird thing that I think was supposed to hold some kind of sextant once upon a time, but it does make a perfect drinks holder.”

“Now that I did know,” Ace says. “Kept a lovely Chardonnay there once to deliver to a girl I was seeing. Broke the sound barrier without even meaning to—got to Mars before the wine even got cold.”

“That’s class,” Lister says, like he knows anything about wine.

“Beautiful girl, too. She was very pleased with my services, too, I can assure you,” Ace says. “But of course, I’m a gentleman. Now, you chaps—it must be pretty lonely all the way out in the sticks like this,” he comments. “So far from home—you’re terribly brave, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“Yes, indeed,” Rimmer cuts in. “Sometimes there are ship-wide maintenance issues that make it seem like we might all perish quickly and painlessly, but usually we manage to pull it together so that we can suffer the excruciating, slow starvation of living out the next hundred years breathing in Lister’s flatulence.”

Lister glances between Rimmer and Ace, who is ignoring Rimmer’s input. “I mean, yeah,” he says, awkwardly, after a beat. “We do get a bit stir-crazy sometimes. But nothing that a crate of lager can’t fix, so.”

“Is there someone back on Earth that you’re missing?” Ace asks, stirring his curry with a chunk of naan bread, and Lister catches it in his peripheral vision when Rimmer lifts his head to stare at them.

Knowing how to answer is a struggle for a second. Lister tries to buy some time by chewing really slowly, and then he makes a big show out of washing it down with his beer. “Uh,” he says, at last. “Not really, no.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Ace says, and adds something else on the end, but it’s impossible to hear because Rimmer interrupts.

“Sorry to be getting in the way here,” Rimmer says, in his shrillest squawk. “Would it be easier for you if we just swept all the dishes aside to give the two of you some room on the top of the table?”

For the first time in about twenty minutes, Ace looks over at Rimmer and actually acknowledges him. “What was that, Arn?” he asks. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

Loudly, Rimmer starts, “I said—”

That’s the point where Lister intercedes. “Don’t mind him, Ace,” he says. “He’s just talking smeg again—he’s fluent in it. So, tell us more about you. What’s it like being so enormously successful in the Space Corps?”

Alright, so sue him—he’s doing this on purpose now.

Ace laughs, shaking his hair back from his face. “Come, now, skipper—I wouldn’t say _enormously_ successful. You know how it is. Sometimes you just… sweep in at the last second to whisk the Prime Minister of Callisto’s daughter out of the path of a meteorite, forcing yourself into a suicide dive in order to keep her safe, and survive against all odds. You can’t predict things like that. I got lucky.”

“You did all that?” Lister asks, egging him on, and he props his chin in his fist. “Gosh. That’s really impressive. Did you get any medals for that?”

Rimmer asks, “Do they even make a medal for Being A Git?”

“Nah,” Lister says, “I don’t think so, or I reckon you’d have one.”

Rimmer’s face sours.

“No, no medals, I’m afraid.” Ace grimaces. “The Admiralty forced me to take the Interplanetary Cross of Honour, which was such a dreadful bore—I hate pompous ceremonies like that, all those needless ten-gun salutes. It just seems wasteful, especially when what I did wasn’t so special. The hard-working men and women who helped to bring me safely home when I was drifting along in space, trying to survive on a ten-hour ration of oxygen in my suit—they’re the real heroes.”

“What a guy,” the Cat says dreamily from his stretcher on the other side of the room, and Ace throws him another charming smile.

“How’re you feeling, old chap?” Ace asks him. “Can I bring you anything? I tend to find that a good massage to the pressure points connected most closely to your injury can be an excellent stimulant to recovery.”

“Oh my God,” Rimmer says.

“It worked wonders on me when I was briefly paralysed after that little incident with the crown jewels of Pasiphae and the dying star,” Ace goes on, ignoring Rimmer entirely. “I’d be happy to give it a go, if you felt it would help.”

The Cat swoons back against his cushion.

Ace smiles. “Perhaps later, eh?” he says, and he winks at Lister.

Lister leans in, as though he’s hanging on Ace’s every word. “So what’s the story with the crown jewels of Pasiphae and the dying star?” he says, his voice as smooth as he can make it, the voice he used to break out when chatting up girls at the bar. “I bet that was really cool and brave. Tell us about that.”

“Oh, I don’t want to bore you,” Ace says dismissively, and then he tells them the most exciting, drama-filled, and impossibly heroic story that Lister has ever heard. There are rocket-jet somersaults around supernovas, skimpily-clad women professing their devotion to him, an entire orphanage of adoring children that he had to carry to safety from the fireball, and with every word, Rimmer looks more and more like he wants to set fire to something. 

“But enough about me,” Ace says, then, and he looks to Rimmer across the table. “I’d love to hear some stories of your dashing bravery, Arn.”

Rimmer stares at him. “What?”

“Well, I’ve been wittering away about all my stories,” Ace says. “We haven’t heard any of yours! Tell me about some of the heroic deeds you must have done. What stories do you have for me?”

Rimmer’s jaw works. “I haven’t got any,” he says tightly.

“You haven’t got any stories for me?” Ace says. “Too many to remember?”

“No, Mr. Ace,” Kryten adds helpfully, “he’s simply a congenital wimp, sir.”

“Now, now, Kryten, I’m sure that Rimmer has done something of value in his life that he can tell me about,” Ace says. He gives Rimmer an encouraging nod. “Isn’t that right, Arnie?”

It would’ve been kinder, Lister reckons, just to tell Rimmer that’s a pathetic, unlovable failure to his face.

As it is, Rimmer’s face contorts slightly, his neck and ears flushing angry purple, and his mouth works itself into a thin line. “No,” he says, at last, his voice strained, and he lets out his breath slowly through his teeth as though he’s trying to deflate his temper. “Nothing of value to report that I can think of. Utterly worthless.”

“Well, that’s simply not true,” Kryten says kindly. “What about, for example… well…” He hesitates. “What about…”

Lister shakes his head. Then, just to steer away from this conversational trainwreck at any cost, he says, “So, what about you, Ace—you got anyone back home?”

“Well, there’s no special someone, but the bed’s never cold, if you catch my drift.”

Lister nods knowingly. “Oh, yeah, I get you,” he said. “You must be really, really popular with girls.”

Ace laughs, and he tosses his head back. “I’m flattered, Dave. No, I get on alright—had to break a couple hearts here and there, of course,” he says, with a rueful smile, “but who doesn’t?”

From the other side of the table, Rimmer gives a stupid, high-pitched laugh. Everyone stops and looks at him.

Ace arches one quizzical eyebrow. “Something funny, Arn?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” Rimmer says, his voice still an octave up from normal and tight in his throat like he’s barely holding back from going ballistic. “Just—well, everything!”

“Well, of course Arnie here knows what I’m talking about,” Ace says, one corner of his mouth tilting up into a charming smile. “You must be fighting the ladies off with both hands, a handsome chap like us, eh?”

Rimmer’s lip curls. “We’re three million years into deep space,” he says, with palpable contempt. “There’s no-one else alive to fight off.”

“Aw, yeah, well, Rimmer here was just crawling in girls,” Lister cuts in, laying it on thick enough to spread on toast, and when Rimmer’s head snaps up, Lister doesn’t look at him. “But see, he had his reputation to think of—had to keep an eye on his moral principles.”

“Lister—” Rimmer starts.

“It was just really hard for him to find anyone good enough,” Lister carries on, ignoring him.

Just then, Rimmer jerks to his feet so abruptly that his leg passes clean through the chair, forgetting in his rage to try and awkwardly manoeuvre himself around the furniture as though he were alive.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he says coldly, “I’ve just remembered I’m late for an appointment to disembowel myself.” He looks at everyone except Lister, and then he comes oddly to attention, heels clicking together, and walks stiffly out.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” Kryten says, wringing his hands together mournfully. “I think he’s struggling to adapt to your being here.”

Ace shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it. I feel much the same way—can’t believe I share a multiverse with such an odious little cold-sore.”

“Don’t be so hard on him, sir,” Kryten says. “At least after this, you’ll get to leave. Just think… he has to live like that all the time.”

Lister stabs at his vindaloo with more force than it really needs.

After a moment, Ace goes on with another exciting Space Corps story, but to tell the truth, there doesn’t seem like much point blatantly flirting with him if Rimmer’s not here to see it.

Every now and then, Ace will lean across the table almost conspiratorially to Lister, to give him a sly smile or encourage him to join in with the fun, and Lister gives a half-hearted smile, but his heart’s not in it. He laughs at Ace’s jokes, and he can’t deny that Ace is a good time, all quips and back-and-forth banter with Kryten, who is delighted to be involved, and it seems like he’s incredible at everything but humble with it as well, so that it’s impossible to get fed up with him. He’s the most charming person that Lister has ever met, and the evening is a lager-flavoured blur as Lister offers him another drink and another after that—to thank him for everything he did today.

By around midnight, the Cat is stirring again, groggy and in pain, so they dose him up with some more morphine, and then work together to carry him off to bed and tuck him in comfortably. Kryten turns in shortly afterwards, which leaves just Lister and Ace killing time in the ship’s bar. 

Ace leans against the bar at his back, his hips tiled lazily forwards, elbows propped on the counter, and he fishes in the jacket of his flight suit until he comes up with a zippo lighter and a packet of fags. He lifts an eyebrow at Lister. “You partake?”

Lister nods. “Yeah. But you’re alright—I’ve got a pack tucked away in just about every room on the ship. There’ll be one around here somewhere, I don’t need to bum one of yours.”

“No, no, I insist.” Ace pinches two cigarettes between his lips, shelters both with one hand and lights them with the other. He exhales smoke, and then holds one out for Lister.

Lister gets to his feet, closes the space between them, and takes it. Their fingertips bump as Ace passes it over.

“Cheers,” Lister says, and he takes a long drag. It steadies him, slows down the rabbit-racing of his pulse beneath his skin. He sidles along next to Ace and leans one hip against the bar so that he can still turn to face him, study that profile which is all at once as familiar as his own hands and yet totally alien. The same long nose, nostrils to go spelunking in, the same expressive mouth. The scar on his jaw is the same, and in this dim light, his eyes register as brown, but Lister knows that if he got up close with the light right, he’d find the same cloudy hazel that he’s used to in his own Rimmer.

It’s only when Ace looks over at him that Lister realises how long he’s been staring, and then it’s too late to pretend otherwise. He just looks back at him, and he swallows.

Neither of them have anything new to say, but Lister can feel the possibility fizzing in the air between them. It’s surreal to think—this is Rimmer without the neuroses and insecurities, without his failures and resentments and desperate, seething jealousy. This is what it’d be like if Rimmer wasn’t afraid to want him.

“You’re a good-looking guy,” Ace says, his voice low and smooth. “You sure you’ve got no-one tying you down?”

Lister clears his throat, and he feels like an idiot, getting flustered in the face of Ace’s brazen, unflinching confidence. _Sort of_ , he means to say. _Yeah, it’s you, but worse at everything_ _._

That’s a thought that gets heat flickering in his gut. This version of Rimmer, with the same hands and mouth, would probably know what to do with them, he’d last longer than five minutes, he’d make it good.

Lister’s mouth is dry, and he doesn’t say anything, and Ace is still looking expectantly at him. Lister shakes his head.

“That’s good,” Ace says, and he pulls on his cigarette. He holds Lister’s eyes over the smouldering end, and Lister’s never been one to swoon and get giddy over smoking, but he sort of gets it now. Ace exhales and, through the smoke, he goes on, “I’ll not beat around the bush, here, skipper. I’d like to take you to bed.”

It’s not a surprise, given that Ace has been undressing him with his eyes for the last few hours, but Lister still chokes a bit and coughs out a plume of blue smoke.

“If you’re not interested, I understand,” Ace says.

“No, no, it’s not that,” Lister manages, flapping the smoke away from his face with one hand. “I’m—no, I’m interested—I just—”

“It must be strange,” Ace says, “since I have his face,” totally getting the wrong end of the stick, and Lister thinks, _smeg it,_ smeg _it._ He grinds the butt of his cigarette into the bar counter, crosses the space between them, and before he can make his move, Ace is ready to meet him.

Ace pulls him in by his leather jacket and kisses him, hard. Lister is hauled up onto tiptoes, and he doesn’t even mind that it makes him feel short because he’s pressed flat against Rimmer—Ace, that is—touching him everywhere. His thigh slots between Lister’s legs, and Lister is so stupidly, desperately horny for human contact that all he wants is to ride that thigh til he comes.

It’s ridiculous, the speed at which Lister is zero-to-two-hundred, but he wants him so badly it feels like a fist tightening in his chest. Ace fits their mouths together with a purposeful slide of tongue, and Lister can’t get close enough, his hands fumbling frantically to press against every part of Rimmer—Ace, smeg, _Ace_ _—_ that he can reach. He wants, he wants, and he gets a hand around the back of Rimmer’s neck only to find that hair too long, slipping too smoothly between his fingers.

There is a moment of clumsiness as Ace draws back far enough to unzip the front of his flight jacket, struggling with his injured arm, but Lister helps him. He yanks the jacket down over Ace’s broad shoulders, wrestles with it for a second before he gives up, grabbing blindly at Ace’s waist to pull him in closer, wanting that mouth again. He doesn’t want to look at Ace too closely and see someone he doesn’t really know. He kisses him hard, open-mouthed, hot and sloppy, gasping into Rimmer’s mouth while he’s still getting out of his jacket sleeves. There is a small part of Lister self-aware enough to recognise that Ace probably thinks there’s something wrong with him from the clumsy, urgent way that his hands are everywhere, frantic, desperate, trying to find skin.

Then, out of nowhere, Rimmer reaches down, grabs Lister by both thighs, and hauls him up in the air.

“Smegging—smeg,” Lister bursts out as Rimmer lifts him onto the counter, and—it’s Ace. Ace, not Rimmer, because let’s get real, as if Rimmer’s got the upper body strength to do that—then Ace presses in between his legs to kiss him breathless. God, but he’s a good kisser as well, Lister’s whole body thrumming with it, every nerve-end sparking, but it’s wrong. It’s all wrong.

Ace drags Lister forwards to the edge of the counter so that he can press in closer, and Lister can feel him, hard against the inside of his thigh. Lister’s hard, too, has been about halfway there all day, and dangerously close now just from grinding against Ace’s thigh, but he can’t do this. He can’t.

Lister braces both hands against Ace’s chest and pushes him back. “Wait—wait, stop.”

“What’s wrong?” Ace leans back, breathless. He looks Lister up and down as though he’s expecting to see something physically wrong with him, and then he peers into Lister’s face, baffled. “What is it?”

Lister can’t look at him. He manages a three-millisecond glance and it’s like looking at Rimmer in a funhouse mirror: the same pink flush up his throat, the same curve of his lower lip, the stance totally different, the brutishly assured way he keeps his hands on Lister’s hips as he waits for the cue to resume. It’s nauseating, and Lister shuts his eyes.

He feels ridiculous, sitting on the counter like a child, but Ace is still stood between his thighs and not showing any signs of moving to let him up. He knows he needs to say something, but his head is a mess and his stomach is in knots and he’s trying not to inspect too closely why that is.

“I’m never normally like this,” he mutters at last, feeling like he needs to justify himself, to promise Ace that he’s actually pretty good in bed, if they were ever to end up there. But if he’s being realistic, they won’t. “Sorry, Ace.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Ace says, and tentatively, he lets go of Lister’s hips, although he doesn’t give him any more space. “I’m going too fast, aren’t I?”

Lister drags his hands down over his face. He wants to throw himself into _Red Dwarf_ ’s engine, because this is the most pathetic he’s ever felt. “No, it’s fine. It’s not that.”

“So what is it? Have I completely misread this? Because I thought I was getting all the signs that you wanted me.”

“I do, but…” Lister’s voice gets stuck in his throat, heat climbing into his cheeks because it’s so smegging humiliating, and he can’t believe himself that it’s come to this. “I can’t believe I’m gonna say this.” He wants the floor to open up and swallow him. “But—not you.”

For a moment, Ace stares at him, uncomprehending. Then he starts to laugh. “The other one? Ha! Good one, Davey boy.”

Lister doesn’t look at him, and slowly, the laughter dies out.

“You’re serious,” Ace says. “My God. Why?”

“Look, it’s complicated,” Lister says, and he pushes at Ace’s chest to get him to back off. He hops down from the counter, straightens his clothes, and avoids making eye-contact. “Me and him—we’ve been through a lot. You’ve just arrived, okay? You don’t get it. I mean, we’re the last two people in the universe—”

“Well, that explains it.”

“No—God, forget it.” There’s no way that Lister can justify this so that Ace will understand—and partly that’s because Lister can’t even justify it to himself. He should be throwing himself at Ace in gratitude— _thank God, finally, at last, a human being I can touch, someone who is attracted to me, someone who is well-adjusted and mentally stable and funny and_ likes _me_ —and yet he can’t stop thinking that this is not what he wants. He wants Rimmer to be less of a toad, not just because he’s a pain in the arse—which he is—but because Rimmer could be happy if he let himself; he wants Rimmer to stop seeing himself as a total failure and a waste of carbon; he wants to see Rimmer relax and lighten up and have fun, every once in a while; he wants to earn that rare, sincere smile of his, and he wants to kiss the Rimmer who he spends every day with and who drives him nuts but keeps him sane. Lister settles, instead, for saying, “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I led you on."

Ace shakes his head. “I just don’t understand,” he says. “You seem like a great guy, Dave. And he’s—well, he’s a rodent.”

“Hey,” Lister snaps. “Back off, alright?”

Ace bristles, and he backs away a step. “Alright, I’m sorry, old pal,” he says, more gently now that Lister is squaring up to him like he’s ready to start something. He holds up two hands in surrender. “I’m sorry. I’m being unreasonable. I suppose—the heart wants what it wants, eh? Even if sometimes the heart wants a rodent.”

“Look, Ace—”

“Sorry, sorry. Obviously, I’m disappointed, but I understand.” Ace frowns into the middle distance, brow furrowing deeper and deeper. “Actually, no, I don’t understand at all, but… good luck with that. I expect you’ll need it.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Ace bends to retrieve his flight jacket from where it is draped inelegantly over the bar, and Lister steps forward to help him ease his injured arm into it. “I just…” Ace says, slow and tentative, once dressed again, “I just don’t know if he deserves it.”

Lister looks from Ace’s face—open, earnest, apprehensive—down to his own boots, and he pushes his hands into the pockets of his boiler suit. For a long moment, he is silent, because he has no way to argue back against that in the face of Rimmer’s obvious, glaring faults: his arrogance, his lazy perfectionism, his nit-picking and pedantry, his pomposity and cowardice and vanity. Ace hasn’t been here long enough to see anything else, and Lister can’t put it into words.

At last, he says quietly, “I think he does.”

They go their separate ways, then—Ace to check on the Cat and then find somewhere to get his ‘three hours’ before he’s well-rested enough to get and go for another twenty-four, and Lister is left standing in the corridor, feeling like the world’s biggest dirtbag. He’s too keyed-up to sleep now, and anyway, he can’t face the long walk back to his new quarters. He wants to talk to someone, to anyone, to clear his head and have some kind of distraction from it all.

No, that’s a load of crap. He wants to talk to Rimmer.

Lister wipes his sweaty hands on his boiler suit, runs a hand over his hair, straightens his leather jacket. He goes back down to D-deck to his old quarters, but then just before he goes in, he hesitates in the corridor. Through the open door, he can see Rimmer lying in his bunk, arms folded behind his head, staring resentfully at the bottom of the empty bunk above. Legs crossed at the ankle, his hair wild in the way it gets when he’s been raking his hands through it, not looking as pissed-off as Lister would’ve expected but—distinctly unhappy.

From head to toe, he’s an exact copy of Ace, but the relief that Lister feels at the sight of him is bone-deep. Lister leans against the doorframe, while Rimmer is still oblivious, because heaven only knows Rimmer is most attractive when he’s not talking, and he tries to imagine what it would be like if Rimmer were real again.

With a sigh, Lister knocks on the doorframe. “Hey.”

Rimmer lifts his head, and blinks at Lister in surprise as he comes in. “That was fast,” he says sourly. “Even I last longer than that.”

Shaking his head, Lister decides not to acknowledge that.

“Then again,” Rimmer drones on, sullen and sulky, as Lister sits down at the table, “I imagine he’s such an astronomically successful lover that he’s got it down to an art form. He can probably set a whole planet aquiver with just the tip of his pinky finger.” He lifts himself up on one elbow. “Well?”

Lister just props his feet up on the table and starts wiggling his boots off. “Nothing happened, man,” he says, which isn’t strictly true, but he doesn’t want to tell Rimmer the truth. If he tells Rimmer that he snogged Ace and then decided he didn’t want to shag him, he’ll have to explain why, and he’ll never smegging live it down. 

“Nothing happened?” Rimmer echoes, and he sits up properly, swinging his legs around. “You went up for a nightcap with Fabio and you expect me to believe that nothing happened?”

With a thump, Lister kicks off his boots and leaves them strewn across the floor. He wiggles his toes in his discoloured, crusty socks, and looks at Rimmer past them. “Yeah,” he says simply.

Rimmer stares at him, bewilderment playing openly across his face. “Why not?”

Lister takes a deep breath, considering carefully. He shrugs, folds his arms, and then says, “Well, he’s just a bit of a prick, isn’t he?”

Just like that, Rimmer relaxes. The tension leaks from his shoulders; the crease fades from his forehead; the hard line of his mouth softens. He gets to his feet and comes to join Lister at the table. “God, he was insufferable,” he says cheerfully, sitting opposite him. “Bragging about all of his medals and all of his girlfriends—disgusting. No class, no dignity. No social graces.”

Lister stretches, takes off his hat, and settles down more comfortably. “D’you wanna play a game of something? Risk?”

Rimmer’s face lights up. He scrambles away to find a skutter to help him get the board and set up the pieces, and then it’s all, _and get your godawful feet off the table, you putrid slime, I’m trying to set up the board here and I’m worried about the fungal growth setting up camp over Ukraine_ —and Lister grins.

***

Lister will never admit to it, not even under torture, not even if you tried to cut his hair—but he’s made an effort. He asked Rimmer two nights ago to reserve this afternoon to explore some of the lesser-visited parts of _Red Dwarf_ , and Rimmer agreed with a kind of surprise and suspicion that suggested he thought Lister wanted to harvest his organs. Hell, Lister will take it.

He’s got on his T-shirt with only one smear of curry down the front; he’s changed his boxers _and_ his socks; he’s even given his armpits a rough going-over with a wet flannel. Not that Rimmer will notice anyway, not unless Lister’s armpits started drawing up a colour-coded hygiene plan. That’s something Lister learned early on in the old days—Rimmer is so mindlessly career-driven and self-absorbed that he doesn’t notice anything unless it threatens to jeopardise his ascent up to admiral. Well, Lister doesn’t care. He gives the pits of his top another quick whiff, just to be safe, and then he heads off.

Rimmer, when he arrives, has not made an effort. He looks frazzled and slightly manic, from the unruly hair to the frantic pace of leg-jiggling that threatens to bore a hole through the floor.

“Ah, there you are,” he declares with a clap of his hands. “Great news!”

“Oh, God.”

“I was perusing some of my old engineering exams as a bit of an early morning pick-me-up, and I discovered something marvellous—the word ‘thermonucler’ _._ That’s right,” he says, and slows it down emphatically: “ _Thermo. Nucler_. Missing an A, clear as anything. Now, as we all well know, according to Space Corps Directive 87751B, any batch of examinations issued with a misprint can be automatically issued with ten marks of extra credit—”

“Rimmer, I don’t think ten spare marks will save you.”

“—so if I can just prove that this misprint applied to the whole cohort,” Rimmer goes on, as though Lister hadn’t spoken, “I’ll have achieved…” He pauses, with a dramatic stare into the middle distance, “Twenty-three marks out of a hundred.”

Lister raises his eyebrows. “That’s still not a pass, though, is it?”

“It would be my personal best! And just think—if I can only find a way to cheat and swindle my way into another forty-odd marks, I’m in! I could be an officer!”

“Gosh, it’s all happening now, ey? I hope you don’t forget about me from those dazzling heights of twenty-three marks.”

“Well, we’ll not get carried away—first, I have to go through every paper printed that year and find another spelling error for Space Corps Directive 87751B to apply, but I have every faith in the negligence and general incompetence of our JMC exam officers.”

Lister stares at him. “That your plan for the day, then?”

“I mean, it might not take up the whole day,” Rimmer says cagily. “I wasn’t necessarily planning to reschedule necrobics for it, but it is going to occupy a considerable portion of my time, yes.”

“So we’re not going round the botanical gardens, then?”

Rimmer blinks at him, nonplussed. “What for?”

Lister rolls his eyes. “For exercise and good health, Rimmer. For the hell of it. Remember?”

“Oh. Was that the plan for today?” Rimmer looks him up and down properly for the first time, and a frown creases between his eyebrows. “What are you all tarted up for?”

“What?”

“Look at you. What, was your tux at the dry cleaners’? White tie not extravagant enough for you?”

“Piss off, Rimmer,” Lister says, regretting this already, and he slaps a hand to the door panel to head inside. He isn’t really expecting Rimmer to follow, more than half anticipating that he’ll smeg off back to his pointless crusade into undermining his own astro-nav exam, but follow he does.

“I never really understood the appeal of these places,” Rimmer remarks as they head down the path to the point where it twists from concrete to carefully laid-out stone mosaics, grass pushing through the cracks. Up ahead, the gardens are overgrown, wild in places where the skutters haven’t been able to tame the growth of three million years, but it’s still nice, lush and green and new. “What’s wrong with just having a potted plant on your windowsill like the rest of us?”

“As if you’ve ever looked after a plant,” Lister scoffs.

“I have! In fact, I’ve looked after two. One, a small tree which I killed in only a few days, and the other a lovely little rhododendron which flowered beautifully and thrived in my care, until one of the boys in my dormitory ate it, poisoned himself, and convulsed to a rather unpleasant death in the middle of the night. Dead git.”

Lister shakes his head in disbelief. “Well, the idea of botanical gardens makes sense to me,” he says. “Years and years into space, in the middle of nowhere, and then you can come here and it’s almost normal. Okay, it’s a bit mad, but, like, you could be back on Earth.”

“Surely Earth isn’t this badly landscaped.”

“No, but—if you squint, it could be a forest anywhere, or like… a nice park somewhere. The grounds for a swanky country house, or something like that. I mean, they modelled it off Kew Gardens, you know? The greenhouses, the little flower displays, the, erm—what do you call ‘em?”

“Plants?” Rimmer suggests, and Lister waggles two fingers up at him.

“You know what I mean. The way it’s all set out, like.” Lister tips his head over, pulling a face. “Or at least, I heard it used to be like that. Not that I’d know, anyway. I never went to the real Kew Gardens. Only even went to London the once, when I was younger, but I suppose I had better things to do than dragging meself round a big garden.”

“As opposed to now, when it’s the height of urbane and sophisticated thrills.”

“Exactly.”

Up ahead, a colossal tree sprawls across the path, having clearly grown so cramped in the space that it resorted to growing sideways, branches curling down into the ground like some big ugly beast tired of holding its own arms up. Each limb where it twists across the ground is thicker than Lister’s waist, leaves unfurling in familiar shapes except in colours that Lister has never seen on trees before—pale blue, electric green, rich thick purple like ink. 

Lister reaches out in front of Rimmer to swat at a low-hanging branch—catapulting the branch back through Rimmer’s head—and plucks off a heavy, pendulous silvery fruit. “What do you reckon this is, then? Edible, d’you think? Or it might be poisonous.”

“We can only hope.”

Lister holds the fruit up dramatically high, flat on his raised palm. “If I die,” he says, “I want to leave you my mug of mould to remember me by.”

“I don’t want it.”

“To Rimmer, my collection of—”

“No, thank you.”

“—outdated penicillin experiments, and the contents of my dirty laundry basket.”

“If I wanted a lesson in the dangers of natural selection, I’d try to hold a conversation with the Cat first.”

Lister shrugs—no pleasing some people—steels himself, and takes a big bite. With a sharp rattling pain through his skull, Lister bites down on something solid, armoured, and hard enough that it feels like it cracks six of Lister’s teeth. “Jesus,” he exclaims, dropping it into the overgrown grass as he leaps back. “It’s like chomping a smegging brick.”

Then, as he watches, the fruit slowly shifts, unfurling what is doubtlessly a very tough exoskeleton, and shortly afterwards emerges the legs and antenna of a very hacked-off beetle the size of Lister’s fist.

“Oh, smeg,” Lister says, as Rimmer squeaks and hops backwards to put Lister bodily between them. “Sorry!”

The insect stares Lister balefully down for a moment, and then scuttles away into the undergrowth. Lister exchanges a baffled look with Rimmer, eyebrows cocked.

Lister says, “Bet that never happened in Kew Gardens.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Rimmer says, dusting off the front of his jacket imperiously, “I’ve never been, either. Never been to Earth, for that matter.”

Lister stops and stares at him. “You what?”

“Jupiter man, born and bred,” Rimmer reminds him, rolling his shoulders back proudly. “Io—New Canterbury, to be precise.”

“Yeah, but—never been to Earth…” Lister says wonderingly, trying to imagine it. He turns it over in his head, and then it hits him. “Hang on. Didn’t we dock at Earth to refuel once? You went to Earth, then, didn’t you?”

“Well. No, technically speaking, I didn’t go on planet-leave on that occasion.”

“Why the smeg not?”

“I didn’t mean to miss it. There was just a, erm—a slight technological hiccup. With regards to wake-up calls.”

It takes Lister a second, but then he lets out a loud, ugly guffaw, half incredulous. “No way, man. You slept through the entirety of our Earthbound planet leave?”

“Oh, alright, rub it in, go on. Idiot Arnold misses another golden opportunity. Grade A Gimboid fritters away his hard-scraped cash to experience the heights of human engineering and machismo—the Coliseum, the Hoover Dam, the Severn Railway Bridge—and sleeps through the whole thing. Go on, have a good laugh.”

“I can’t,” Lister admits. “It’s too sad. Too easy—it’s no fun. Come on, smeghead.” Not for the first time, Lister wants to reach out, slap a comforting hand to Rimmer’s shoulder, but pulls it back just in time. He balls his hand into a fist instead, swings it ineptly at his side before giving up. “Nah, forget the Coliseum,” he says after a beat as they set off again, wandering through the wild and weird overgrown tangle of foliage. “You want to see the best of Earth, you want to get yourself to East Z East. Get yourself an extra-hot madras with the chilli paneer. That’s what you want.”

Rimmer looks revolted, his nose wrinkling. “A lukewarm, serve-it-yourself heart attack on a plate? Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll pass on that one. Then again, you’ve never been to Jupiter, have you?”

“I dunno, I went on a crazy night out on Ganymede once. Does that count?”

“No, it doesn’t count,” Rimmer says contemptuously. “You might as well tour a few roundabouts in Swindon and ask if that’s the same as driving through the Swiss Alps. Miles apart, Listy, _worlds_ apart.”

“Is this not just some stupid intermoon rivalry thing?”

“It’s not stupid,” Rimmer retorts. “It’s pure science, plain and simple. The Ionians are glorious victors in everything they put their minds to, while the Ganymese are the dregs, the gunk at the bottom of the barrel of defeat, the absolute low-lives.”

“So which one are you from again?”

“Oh, har-har.”

“Okay, so what is it, then? What makes Io so much better than Ganymede?”

“Ganymede is scummy.”

“What, the whole planet?”

“No. Well, yes. I don’t know. Lots of it. Piles of refuse, half-decomposed furniture fly-tipped on street-corners, failing shops and boarded-up houses. Yobbish teenagers sharpening kitchen knives on the train station railings.”

Lister pulls a face. “Sounds like home sweet home. You sure you’ve never been to Earth?”

“You know, I can never exactly how serious you are when you say things like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like when you make Liverpool sound like this dire cesspit of putrid smeg.”

“I thought you told me that one time that I’m not clever enough to make stuff up.”

“I don’t know, you could always surprise me.”

“No, it weren’t always as bad as all that. I know it used to be good. I went off the rails a bit after me dad died, but to tell you the truth I wasn’t massively mega committed to being on the rails at any point anyway. You know how it is, when you’re young and stupid and your mates are egging you on. Everyone else were skipping school to go and slash tires, so you might as well tag along or you wouldn’t have any mates. You know.”

“No, I don’t. To reiterate, at my school, I had a potted plant confiscated because a boy ate it and killed himself. Bleaker still when you consider that I had a big obvious sign on it about how poisonous and deadly it could be if ingested.”

“Oh.” Lister considers this. “No, well—it wasn’t as bad as all that. At least, not all the time. Where I grew up, we were all in the shadow of the interstellar link station. It blocked out the sun sometimes in the winter, and the noise was incredible. This low rumbling, all the time, all day and night. I remember when I first left home, I had a hard time sleeping at first because I couldn’t get used to it being so quiet. Used to sleep with headphones in and just play white noise. Then I got stuck with you and your smegging _Learn Esperanto_ discs and you put it on for me.”

Rimmer says, “I thought you hated my night-time revision.”

“I absolutely do,” Lister says. “It’s a pain in the arse and half the time it keeps me up at night, but—I’m used to it now.” He is quiet for a moment, and he says it almost without thinking: “Was harder to sleep without it, last few weeks.”

Rimmer looks over, and Lister meets his eyes with a rueful kind of shrug, like _well, what can you do?_ It’s not like Lister planned to feel miserable and stupid once he moved out, or like he enjoyed all those nights spent staring at the ceiling, wide-awake and stubbornly refusing to accept that he can’t sleep without the irritating background noise of Rimmer’s snoring, Rimmer’s sleep-mumbling, Rimmer’s revision discs, the lot of it.

Anyway, it didn’t last long. He moved back into his old room not long after Ace Rimmer cleared off, although he never really announced it or made any excuse for Rimmer. He just… started hanging out in their old room more and more, and slobbed around his old bunk while he was shooting the smeg, and sometimes he would fall asleep up there in the middle of the day, and then when he couldn’t be bothered to walk back to his quarters on B-deck, it was easier to stay the night. Easier to eat his breakfast there, too, dropping egg yolk and bacon grease on the floor, and he let Rimmer snipe at him for being disgusting, and when he started bringing his stuff back in neither of them commented on it.

“I would’ve thought it’d be more peaceful,” Rimmer says, picking at some unseen lint or fluff on his sleeve in a charade of indifference so transparent you could use it in an advert for Windolene.

“Nah, just more time for playing guitar,” Lister says, and grins at the face that Rimmer pulls.

There is a beat, and then, in the same casual voice, Rimmer asks, “Am I really your next of kin?”

Lister pauses. “Well,” he says awkwardly. “I mean. Yeah. You are.”

Rimmer’s hands twist together, and Lister watches his thumb rub distractedly over the backs of his knuckles, anxious and self-soothing. “When did you decide that?”

Lister shrugs. “Can’t remember. Since the accident, though—not much point letting anyone else know if I keel over.”

“Well, I don’t know that I’ll be much help, either,” Rimmer admits. “You should get Kryten involved, or the skutters—someone who can actually pick you up or cart you off to the medical bay when needed.”

“Not the Cat, though.”

“God, no.”

Lister hesitates. “Do you actually want me to switch over to someone else?” he asks. “Free you of the responsibility, I mean.”

“Well,” Rimmer says, and falters. “Well—you don’t—it’s fine, if you—you don’t have to. If you don’t want. I don’t mind. If you don’t.”

Lister looks across at him as they walk side by side, Rimmer with his head ducked, looking down at his hands twisted together. His eyes flick up briefly to meet Lister’s, and then away again. “Alright,” Lister says, after a beat. “Cheers, Rimmer.”

The quiet that stretches between them, then, is heavy, loaded, and as Lister watches, Rimmer takes a deep breath, as though psyching himself up to plunge into cold water, and Lister wonders if they are finally going to talk about it. So far, they’ve probably managed to break some kind of record for sweeping things under the rug—they’re not shagging, they’re not talking about not shagging, they’re not talking about how Rimmer severed all ties with enough force to propel a bin lorry round several laps of a NASCAR circuit—but maybe this is when the dam is finally gonna break.

Rimmer says nothing, releases the breath he had just built up, and the pace of his hand-wringing kicks up a gear until Lister thinks he might take the skin off his fingers if he’s not careful. Lister lowers his eyes to his boots, pretending not to pay attention, because Rimmer is like a wild animal, easily spooked, and needs to come to the handful of birdseed of his own volition. 

Honestly, Lister doesn’t even know if he wants to talk about what happened with them. He has kind of moved past needing Rimmer to say anything or acknowledge what a massive twat he was being, because he knows that Rimmer regrets it and feels bad, and even at the end time it was obvious that they both knew Rimmer was talking out of his arse—and Lister really can’t be bothered to talk about how he feels or anything of that smeg. Besides, it’s not like it really matters anyway, since they both know that Rimmer would rather die than apologise for anything, so—

“I’m, erm,” Rimmer says, and his voice is quiet, slightly strained. “I’m sorry.”

Lister’s head lifts.

Rimmer is very determinedly not looking at him. “For the things I said,” he adds, sounding even more uncomfortable, if that’s at all possible. “And implied.”

Lister gives it a minute to see if Rimmer is gonna say anything else, but he’s still wringing and stressing himself out, so Lister takes pity on him. He decides to save Rimmer from himself. “You’re alright,” he says, and carries on walking.

Rimmer looks up. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

Some of the tension bleeds from Rimmer’s shoulders. He fidgets, smooths his hands over the front of his jacket. “Oh.” He seems nonplussed. “Well. I thought I’d have to work a lot harder than that.”

“Nah. I’m just amazed that apologising hasn’t brought you out in hives.”

“It’s alright, I can always ask Holly to materialise an epi-pen for me if the old allergy does flare up.”

That one gets Lister, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, and they go on together. As they round the corner of the path, they come out from underneath the canopy of a natural arch in the trees, branches tangling overhead to form a verdant, leafy roof. They come out into a space that is dimmer than before, and when Lister lifts his head to see if something is wrong with the lighting, he understands.

“Smeg...” he says, and trails off inadequately. Above them, the usual lighting has been stripped back to the same glass from which the observation dome is constructed, and the effect is of the open, unfettered expanse of sky, millions of stars glinting across space like tiny scattered sequins. “That’s incredible.”

“What is?” Rimmer asks, and sort of accidentally walks through Lister, oblivious.

“Look,” Lister says, and he points.

Rimmer is quiet for a moment, considering. Then he says, sagely, “Ah. Space.”

Lister throws him an irritated look.

“Well, it’s just the same as it is everywhere else, isn’t it?” Rimmer exclaims, getting defensive. “Black with white bits. We could’ve seen that out of the window of our sleeping quarters.”

Lister doesn’t know why he bothers. “God, Rimmer, you’ve got all the romantic inclination of roadkill,” he mutters, and he heads off down the path again.

Rimmer scoffs, following. “I don’t see why I should have to swoon at the sight of sunsets and snowdrifts and the stupid smegging stars on command—what has any of those ever done for me? They’re all aesthetic, no ergonomics. Contribute nothing to anything or anyone. No, you want romantic? Show me a Spitfire; show me a well-oiled locomotive engine; show me a freshly-ironed pocket square, or—”

Rimmer suddenly stops talking, and he makes a strange noise, the air rushing out of his lungs in one burst, like all the pent-up words he was accelerating into his stupid rant about sunsets had suddenly stalled and crashed into itself at breakneck speed.

Lister stops and turns to find Rimmer several feet away behind him, having halted so abruptly that for a minute Lister worries that something’s gone wrong at the hologram projection suite. A small fire in the arrogance generator, maybe, or a corrupted drive in the Inappropriate War Lust folder. The only giveaway that the problem isn’t with Rimmer’s projection is the movement of his eyes, slowly tracking over Lister’s body, his clothes, and then higher, up to the stars unfolding over his head. Taking it all in. Putting it all together.

“ _Red Dwarf_ to Rimmer,” Lister says. “Come in, come in.”

Rimmer says, “Oh.” That’s all, his voice surprisingly quiet, and Christ, he’s so smegging stupid.

“There we go,” Lister says.

Now Rimmer’s gaze drops to the path, somewhere near Lister’s feet, and he doesn’t look at him. “I didn’t realise—”

“No kidding, man.”

At that, Rimmer’s face contorts through a series of complicated expressions, his mouth twisting strangely, nostrils going beserk, and Lister can see him going red above the collar of his quilted jacket. “You,” he says helplessly, voice slightly strangled. “You—you let me blather on this whole time like a total gimboid.”

“Not much different from usual,” Lister says, and relishes in the muscle jumping in Rimmer’s jaw. “Besides, no offence, Rimmer, but the only thing worse than going out on a date with you is having to explain that we’re already on one. You said it yourself, your idea of romance is a bed with hospital corners and a mattress protector. Fat chance getting you to do anything spontaneous.”

“I can be spontaneous,” Rimmer objects, and searches around wildly for something spontaneous to do in order to prove it. “Just watch. Look, I’ll—I’ll—”

“Rimmer, leave it. You don’t have to.”

“I don’t have to, but I want to. I want to. Because I’m just so terrifically spontaneous, you see, and I have decided, here and now, spontaneously, that I am going to—I’m going to—erm—”

“Please, don’t.”

Rimmer seems to deflate, then. “Oh, thank God,” he says, but it lacks his usual vehemence. “Look, I’m sorry I’m not perfect. I’m sorry my idiotic, nobby parents never read me poetry and took me to art galleries so that I could develop a palate for the finer things in life. I’m sorry,” he goes on, and now his voice is more familiar, low and bitter, but Lister can’t help wondering if there’s a real apology smothered in there somewhere, “that it seems I missed that crucial seminar on charisma and charm and—and—and raw animal magnetism. I am so terribly sorry that nothing I do is ever good enough.”

“Rimmer, I don’t want poetry,” Lister says, exasperated. He pushes his hands into the pockets of his boiler suit. “I’m gonna regret saying this, but I actually like spending time with you. Mostly. Provided you’re not telling me off or going on about some board game you played twenty years ago or trying to get me Morris dancing or checking things against the rulebook—”

“You’ve just ruled out most of my favourite things,” Rimmer points out, and Lister ignores him.

“I do like you sometimes, man. So I don’t need any of that smeg. You, without trying to pull anything stupid—that’s what I’m after. And that's all I'm after." He doesn’t much want to look at Rimmer after all that, so he scuffs the toe of his boot along the mosaic tiles underfoot and pretends to be very interested in the pattern he’s drawing. “That’s it.”

The words are no sooner out of Lister’s mouth than he’s kicking himself for them, stupid and earnest and totally brainless, and he might as well say it to a brick wall, because everyone knows that the day God was handing out any kind of tenderness Rimmer slept in late or he was ironing his pyjamas, so what’s the point? Yet for all that, Rimmer still hasn’t said anything snidey, and the silence is going on too long. When Lister lifts his head, at last, it is to find Rimmer just—looking at him.

Well, smeg.

By this point, Lister likes to think that he knows Rimmer backwards, knows every iteration of every face he’s ever pulled. However, just for that second, Lister meets Rimmer’s eyes and he has no idea how to interpret what he sees there—and Lister couldn’t tell you why if you paid him, but looking at him like that sort of hurts, so Lister doesn’t. He looks back at his feet, heat prickling up the back of his neck.

Rimmer clears his throat. “Well,” he says, and he rocks on the balls of his feet. “That’s very kind of you. Do you want to take the ring measurement now, or—”

Dropping his head back with a groan, Lister wheels around and away from him.

“I just think that with such a beautiful, heartfelt speech—”

“Smeg off, Rimmer.”

“—and of course, such splendid scenery to set the mood, might as well—”

“No, I’ve changed my mind. I’m leaving.”

“Darling, don’t go.”

Lister wants to push him into a pile of ferns. He jerks towards Rimmer threateningly, and even though there’s no way he could physically hurt him, Rimmer flinches away, and the way he stumbles over his own feet in panicked retreat, like a skittish horse, gets a bark of laughter out of Lister, he can’t help it.

As they fall back into step with one another, Lister asks, “So what, you never got a girl flowers, nothing like that?”

“Call her picky, perhaps, but Inflatable Ingrid was never a fan, on account of the thorns,” Rimmer says sarcastically.

Lister laughs. “A real girl.”

“No, never had occasion. Didn’t really see the point, to tell the truth.” Here Rimmer straightens up, his voice dropping low into the silly, over-exaggerated impersonation of every charming officer they’ve ever met. “ _Here you are, darling dearest, I wanted to demonstrate how much I care for you, so here, have a large clump of dead plants for you to arrange artfully so that we can watch them slowly decompose together. I had originally hoped to create a lovely little bouquet out of fox-mangled pigeon corpses, but Mr. Bushytail got just a mite carried away, so I suppose this will have to suffice.”_

“Box of chocolates?” Lister tries.

Rimmer slips back into the voice. “ _Happy anniversary, you greedy cow._ ”

“You can’t smegging win,” Lister says in wonder.

“I like the idea of jewellery,” Rimmer says, after a moment.

“You what? You, Mr. Stingy Bastard 2044, you like the idea of forking out big money on something sparkly?”

“Well, no, I’d never do it, but that's the one I can at least understand. There’s something fairly—oh, I don’t know, proprietary, about it.”

“Why not just microchip a girl and be done with it?”

“You laugh, Listy, but that’s what this is all about. In the infamous words of Oscar Wilde, _everything in the world is about sex, except for sex. Sex is about power_.”

Lister makes a face, thoughtful. “Makes sense,” he says. “I mean, look at you.” And with that, he walks ahead before Rimmer twigs it.

Twenty seconds pass in comfortable silence. Then, Rimmer says, “Hey!”

***


	7. Red and Gold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for depression and mentions of suicidal ideation.

**VII**

On _Red Dwarf,_ most mornings tend look exactly like the one before. This morning, however, looks different. This morning looks like Rimmer having some kind of nervous break. That, in and of itself, is not so unusual—after all, Rimmer likes to average two or three of those a week—but for the last two hours he has been repeatedly flitting in and out of whatever room Lister is in, making conversation like a man recording a hostage video, turning funny colours, and then leaving again.

If Lister were to put money on it, he’d say Rimmer had done something embarrassing and was working up to asking for help. It brings to mind the Sunburn Incident of 2043, or the time Rimmer mixed up his Deep Heat and his Vaseline, or that time he lost his watch inside Inflatable Ingrid—the list goes on, really. The only place that this theory falls down is that Rimmer doesn’t have a body anymore, so he’d be hard-pressed to cock anything up too badly.

Lister decides that it can’t be anything to be too concerned about, and so he tries largely to put it out of his head—at least until he is heading down to the nearest vending machine to ask for a Sugar Puff sandwich and a lager, and Rimmer cuts him off halfway down the corridor.

“I’ve got something for you,” Rimmer says stiffly, and then immediately pulls a face like he wants to kill himself. Trailing fearfully behind him is a skutter that looks like it might be trembling.

Lister stares at him, baffled. “You what?”

“Just—shut up for a moment,” Rimmer mutters, and then he snaps his fingers at the skutter. “Come on, you blathering idiot, get on with it. He hasn’t got all day.”

Lister raises his eyebrows. It’s an interesting change of perspective from the usual criticism that he spends all of his time slobbing around, doing nothing, so lazy he’s almost decomposing—but Lister doesn’t argue, just watches as the skutter rolls up with a sheaf of A3 paper clamped in its claws.

“What’s this, then?” Lister asks as he bends to retrieve the sheet, and he turns it over to reveal a massive, painstakingly coloured-in… timetable. He lifts his head to look at Rimmer. “Is there something that I’m missing here? What’s this for?”

“Oh, it’s nothing—I had it lying around,” Rimmer says, and he makes a discreet shooing motion towards the skutter from behind his leg. “Just a load of old tot I had kicking about, getting in the way, taking up space—don’t, erm—” He half-jerks forwards, one hand lifting protectively towards the timetable as Lister lifts it closer for a better look. “Don’t bend it though.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be careful, don’t worry,” Lister says, and he pinches the paper between forefinger and thumbs in an exaggerated piss-take of care as he inspects it. On paper, Lister’s whole week is set out into neatly demarcated half-hour segments, meticulously coloured in pencils and labelled, and Lister recognises, then, that this has taken Rimmer ages.

Exercise, five times a week, both strength and cardio—as if. Planning for the future and career prospects, Tuesday evening—no way, not ever. Early nights every day of the week except Saturday, when he pushes the boat out with a wild party animal lifestyle of a ten PM bed-time. It’s totally smegging stupid, and there’s no way in a million years that Lister’s gonna actually follow it, but Rimmer’s made an effort, and he’s looking at Lister in anxious, expectant hope, and Lister doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s crap.

“You’ve got me down to work out nearly every day here, Rimmer,” Lister says instead. “What’re you trying to say?”

“Only that as your metabolism slows down, I’m increasingly worried that one day you’re going to throw yourself into bed and crash down through the top bunk.”

Lister squints at the rest of the timetable. “Revision,” he reads. “What am I revising, exactly?”

Rimmer falters. “Well—well. Erm. Whatever you like, really. Just a chance for general self-improvement, I suppose.”

“Oh, right.”

Another study of the timetable reveals toilet breaks, snacks breaks, little notes as to how various events and so-called ‘sessions’ fit in with Rimmer’s schedule—and then, in writing so small that Lister didn’t catch it at first glance, is Friday evening, seven PM: _courting Arnold._

“You are joking,” Lister says, staring at it, dumbstruck. “You are having me on. Rimmer, what is this supposed to be?” he asks, and points it out.

For a moment, Rimmer’s mouth flaps like a bird going south for winter, and he goes an uneven shade of pink that Lister’s never seen before, not even when Lister’s described how he’d suck him off if he ever got the chance. “Well, the last time was an unmitigated disaster!” he splutters shrilly at last. “Total catastrophe—made Krakatoa look like the Weebles. I thought we could maybe, perhaps, if you wanted to, we could—we could have a do-over.”

Lister looks at him. “We’ve got a poor track record with do-overs, me and you.”

“Try to keep Kochanski out of it and I reckon we’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, yeah, got you. Try not to fall asleep either.”

“That was one time,” Rimmer protests.

“One out of two,” Lister points out. “So you’ve got a fifty-fifty failure rate so far.”

“At least I always remembered who I was with.”

“Yeah, yeah, alright, Susan.”

“That’s Second Technician Susan to you, Private No-one.”

“Oh, lardy-dar,” Lister sing-songs in his stupidest, poshest voice—the one that, admittedly, he usually reserves for a Rimmer impression. “And what will we do when we go _courting_ , exactly? Play croquet?”

“Yeah, maybe—watch a bit of polo, eat cucumber sandwiches,” Rimmer muses. “Spit on the poor, perhaps?”

“Oh no, I don’t spit on the poor. I pay others to do that for me.”

Rimmer laughs and shakes his head. “You’re an idiot,” he says.

Lister holds up both hands in surrender. “Guilty as charged.”

“A total smegging idiot,” Rimmer says again, but something in his voice is softer than Lister’s used to. 

“And useless,” Lister says, and with one hand pushed into his pocket, he rocks on the balls of his feet. Each rock brings him closer into Rimmer’s space, leaning up, chin tilted up as though to meet him halfway. “And stupid and daft, too. And don’t forget hopeless.”

“No, no, I’d never forget hopeless.” The corner of Rimmer’s mouth lifts, almost imperceptibly, and it’s not every day you see Rimmer thinking about a smile without any mockery in it. His face is warm and earnest and when he’s relaxed like this he actually looks stupidly handsome, and Lister can feel that he’s grinning up at him like a total dope.

“You like ‘em hopeless, do you?”

“Oh, naturally,” Rimmer says, and his eyes flick to Lister’s mouth for just a second. If Rimmer was real—if he was solid, that is—then Lister would be swaying in near enough now that they’d be breathing the same air. “How else would I maintain my facade of being cool and aloof?”

“You, cool?” Lister’s grin spreads wider. “Spin on, man. No way.”

“It’s been known to happen,” Rimmer says.

Lister rolls his eyes. “When?”

Rimmer wets his lips, instinctive and automatic. Without thinking, Lister’s gaze drops to follow the movement. “Now, for instance,” Rimmer says, and his voice drops lower, quieter, just for Lister.

“Oh, yeah?” Hands still in pockets, Lister leans in closer, his body angled so that there is space between them, but not much. If Rimmer were real—God, if only Rimmer were real. “You reckon you’re being cool and aloof right now?”

Rimmer’s eyes dart between Lister’s face, down to the lessening space between them, back again, to Lister’s face, his mouth, his mouth again. “Could I recite the laws of thermodynamics if I wasn’t?”

Lister raises his eyebrows. “Can you?”

Rimmer swallows. “Something-something—if no energy enters or leaves the system, in all energy exchanges, the potential energy will always be less than the initial state—something or other,” he says, and he is still wearing that tiny half-smile, and Lister is determined to get a proper smile out of him.

“Whoa—steady on, I’m swooning,” Lister teases. “I never heard you know so much about physics all in one go. You want me in your astro-nav exam with you?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Go on, big man,” Lister says, and he drops his voice into the deep, throaty impersonation he reserves for every officer who’s ever got on his pecs, and he goes on, “ _How do you want me, sir? Over the exam table? Talk me off about_ —smeg knows. Quasars.”

“You’re incorrigible,” Rimmer says, and—victory!—his face breaks into a proper smile, while at the same time, one hand comes up to rub at the back of his neck. “I mean—no, that’s—that’s not—oh, shut up.”

“You’re just so cool,” Lister says, trying to batten down his big stupid grin, the better to play it serious and wind Rimmer up, but with limited success. “So cool and—dare I say it—aloof. It just drives me wild, see, and—”

“Whatever this is,” the Cat says, in a big loud voice, “can it happen somewhere else? I’m trying to sneak, and this disgusting display is really cramping my style.”

Lister jerks back a step from Rimmer, and he looks over to see the Cat further down the corridor, wearing a lavender tuxedo and a scowl.

“Oops,” Lister says. “Sorry.”

The Cat squints at him. “No, you’re not.”

Lister’s grin widens. “Nah, I’m not,” he says, but he does step aside to allow the Cat room to pass.

In his wake, Rimmer stands with his hands clasped awkwardly behind his back, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet with nervous energy. “So,” he says, after a beat, “what do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of the Russian feudal system, Lister.”

“It’s hard to know what to say,” Lister admits truthfully, and he looks down again at the timetable still in his hand—because it’s utterly daft and he doesn’t know why Rimmer would bother, except as some stupid, anally bureaucratic version of a grand romantic gesture, and that’s something Lister doesn’t want to look at too closely.

“Well, one option is always, _no way, never in a million years, not if you were the last hologrammatic life-form in existence—_ ”

Lister looks at him. “I’m not gonna say that.”

“No?” Rimmer’s voice is somewhat unsteady. “Well. Alright. Then I suppose there’s the other option.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lister leans over towards Rimmer and holds the timetable where they can both see it, as he squints and peruses the little coloured columns and rows. He tracks his finger along to that little red square, taps it right hard in the centre, and then looks up at Rimmer and winks. “See you on Friday at seven. Wear something sexy.”

And with that, he swans off to get himself some lunch, feeling fairly pleased with himself and leaving Rimmer helplessly spluttering behind him.

***

“No life-signs on-board, but the scan suggests that they might have an FTL drive,” Holly says, as the combined Dwarfers crowd around to see the derelict that they’re aiming for.

“If there’s no life on-board, who set off the distress signal?” Rimmer asks.

“Perhaps they evacuated in escape-pods once they realised that there was no-one coming to help them.” Kryten suggests. “Or perhaps they didn’t survive whatever disaster led them to signal for help.”

“Ah,” Rimmer says. “Danger. Splendid.”

“Perhaps we should steer clear,” Kryten says.

Lister shakes his head. “No way. We’re going in.” He flattens his hat on top of his head and straightens the front of his jacket. “If it’s got tech that can help us get back to Earth, I don’t care how dangerous it is. I don’t care if I have to swim through acid without a Speedo, I’m going for it.”

“I’m with Lister,” Rimmer adds.

Lister looks at him quizzically. “Really? You’d do that?”

“No, I’d let you do that.”

Lister rolls his eyes.

“When we get a bit closer, I can scan in more detail, try and pull up the ship’s ident and find out some more for us,” Holly says. “You lot get kitted up—I’ll let you know.”

As they get into suits and helmets, load bazookoids, and hand out big duffel bags to fill with whatever they can find, Holly fills them in on incoming details. The derelict was originally a postal station, a checkpoint for delivery ships running things to and from deep space—until the last communication, a distress call for help as a factory fire spread through the warehouse and then, in turn, to the rest of the ship. No survivors.

“So—empty ship, a little bit crispy?” the Cat suggests. “I can work with that.”

“I doubt it,” Kryten says. “Few people volunteer to work this far in deep space—the station would have been primarily populated by factory droids. They would have survived the fire.”

“Or started it,” Lister says.

“Either way,” Holly adds, “this distress signal has been going out for over a million years. Safe to say, they might have gone a bit doolally in that time.” 

“Oh, goodie,” Rimmer says.

Suited and booted and armed to the teeth, the four of them wait by the airlock to get docked and the go-ahead to disembark. There is the low hiss of the airlock repressurising, and Lister stands there fidgeting in his heavy gear as Kryten does his level best to get them all worked up about the dangers waiting on the other side of the door.

“If the droids are still around, and they have been surviving alone for all that time, they would make for very formidable foes. Their senses would be far in advance of our own,” Kryten warns. “Not to mention keener eyesight, a hostile nature, and a complete lack of empathy.”

“Is this still the droids, or are we talking about my mother?” Rimmer asks.

Lister opts to ignore that. “So how many do you reckon we’re talking here?”

Kryten grimaces. “I’m not sure. With a ship of this size… there may well be hundreds. We should move carefully and quietly so as not to unnecessarily alert the droids to our presence.”

“Alright, let’s make quick work of this, then,” Lister says. “Prioritise essentials—fuel, food, tools, and films that don’t have Nicholas Cage in. Kryten, you and Rimmer take the engine room. Me and the Cat’ll take the quarters and the warehouse.” He glances around at them. “Any questions?”

Rimmer and the Cat put their hands up.

“Any questions other than ‘ _can we just go home’_?”

Slowly, Rimmer and the Cat lower their hands.

“Good talk.” Lister nods at them all. “Let’s say… half an hour, and then meet back in the landing bay?” He hoists his bazookoid up onto his shoulder. “Right—let’s go shopping.”

They split up to rummage separately and get busy nicking anything useful that’s not nailed down. A collection of pirated videos; a pile of battered comics about a superhero who is half-man, half-porcupine; a bag of salt and vinegar crisps; a partially deflated football. Some of the stuff that Lister finds is in no condition worth taking—it looks like it’s been at least a couple centuries since the droids took over, if the walls stripped of panels and wiring are anything to go by. By the look of things, the droids have been slowly cannibalising the ship to keep themselves going, but a lot of the human things have been left alone. There’s a Hawaiian shirt close to Lister’s size, and a squeezy mop-head that Kryten will like, and a tool-set which isn’t missing all the screwdriver heads, which is already a good start. Lister glances at his watch as he goes—fifteen minutes to go. 

As he heads towards the remainder of the living quarters, he hears the rattling approach of maintenance droids coming down the corridor. Swearing under his breath, Lister dashes to press himself close alongside a dispensing machine to stay out of sight. Only once the sound has long since faded does Lister dare to pop his head out, and he keeps low to the ground as he hurries towards the kitchen.

Once inside, Lister starts raiding the cupboards, piling his duffel bag with cans and cans of baked beans, pre-prepared new potatoes, mushy peas, tomato soup, spam, anything he can find which would still be edible after hundreds of years. The silence of the drifting ship seems to amplify every footstep, every clink of cans together as he shifts the weight of his bag.

He checks his watch again. Ten minutes.

His bag is full by now, but he heads down towards the cargo deck, most of which has been turned into a massive warehouse for processing and packaging. There should be enough time for him to dick around in here and see if there’s anything that might be useful—and either way, this is the same floor as the landing bay, which means he can always use this as a short-cut back to _Starbug._

Lister digs through the first few boxes that he finds, but mostly they seem to be filled with packing peanuts and nothing else. He finds a roll of duct tape still in good nick, which he shoves into the pocket of his leather jacket, and then he turns the corner and almost walks straight into the back of one of the maniac killer droids.

He backpedals hastily, not daring to breathe, retraces his steps backwards around the corner, and then presses back tight against the shelving unit.

Smeg—he’s gonna need to find another route.

Lister tiptoes back through the labyrinth of shelves and boxes in search of a safer path back to _Starbug,_ but then as he is busy sneaking, he passes a big window through to what must have once been the manager’s offices. As he creeps from one point of safety to the next, he catches sight of Rimmer on the other side of the office window, presumably also taking a short-cut back to _Starbug_.

Their eyes meet, and Rimmer does a double-take as he registers Lister’s presence, eyes widening. It takes absolutely no effort to make him jump, since he’s about as easily startled as an oblivious baby deer—and it’s not worth winding him up over. Lister instead cocks his eyebrows with a smirk, and blows him a kiss through the glass.

Rimmer scowls, going pink at the ears, and he mouths something unintelligible.

Lister frowns. _You what?_ he mouths back.

Rimmer’s scowl deepens, and he mouths again, the same pattern of sounds, still totally nonsense to Lister, separated as they are by a plane of glass and the silence they’ve imposed to evade the bonkers warehouse droids.

Lister squints, scrutinising Rimmer’s lip movements, but he knows smeg all about lip-reading, and he gets nothing. _What?_

Massively over-exaggerated mouthing now, Rimmer points his own mouth like that’s going to make the slightest bit of difference.

Lister shakes his head, mouthing back, _That doesn’t help—_

“I said, _PISS OFF_ ,” Rimmer yells at maximum volume.

It echoes and echoes throughout the warehouse, and Lister winces. At that moment, he hears Kryten, far in the distance, say distinctly, “Well, now that’s done it,” and that’s when the doors get kicked open by a pair of furious droids, eyes flashing, rifles raised.

“Oh, isn’t that just perfect,” Rimmer says sarcastically, instead of running away, and Lister slams his hand on the glass to get his attention. That, of all things, is what scares the smeg out of Rimmer, and he turns around in flailing panic to glare at Lister, like _Lister_ is the problem here.

“Leg it, you moron!” Lister shouts at him. “Smegging move—go!”

Bullets start cracking through the air around them, and Rimmer flinches, ducks, and works himself into a helpless panic, skittering back and forth like a squirrel trapped between two lanes of traffic and making no headway.

“Oh, for smeg’s sake,” Lister swears, watching the droids close in on Rimmer’s position, and he resigns himself to the fact that he’s about to do something very stupid for a moron who won’t even be grateful.

He bends, grabs a metal pipe from a pile of rubble on the ground and pelts down to the corridor that comes round behind the droids closing in on Rimmer. He takes a deep breath, steeling himself, and then starts banging as hard as he can against the metal brackets of the shelves nearest to him. “Oi, over here—come and get me, you big stupid ugly tin cans!”

Immediately, the droids’ heads swivels to focus on him, small eyes lighting up beady red. Then, just past them, the red eyes of another droid are illuminated—and another, and another. Five droids that Lister had not previously noticed, all zeroing in on him. Behind them, Rimmer stands, white-faced, panicked, frozen and staring at Lister, and then there is the sound of the droids charging up their weapons, and that’s all the time there is for paying attention to whatever the hell Rimmer is doing.

“Whoops,” Lister says. He gulps, turns on his heels, and bolts.

Behind him, the droids come charging at high speed and maximum fury, and Lister weaves between falling boxes and exploding cardboard and collapsing shelves, and as he goes skidding around the corner towards the landing bag, he crashes into Kryten.

“Mr. Lister, sir,” Kryten cries. “Whatever happened to quiet and careful?!”

“Change of plan,” Lister shouts at him, slapping a hand on Kryten’s chest-plate, and pointing past him towards the ship. “New plan: scarper. Where are Rimmer and the Cat?”

“Already on board, sir,” Kryten says. “The Cat is starting up the engine, and I believe Mr. Rimmer is breathing into a paper bag.”

Lister nods—ducks as bullets come whistling overhead again—and he pushes Kryten towards the landing bay. “Right, come on, go-go-go!” he urges, and they run together back to _Starbug_. Lister mounts the stairs two at a time and then ducks straight away into the cockpit to help the Cat get them in the air.

“Are we good to go?” the Cat calls over the noise of the incoming gunfire. “We’re taking more damage than Mel Gibson’s career!”

“Shutting the doors now, sirs,” Kryten calls back. “Ready to go!”

“Hang on—” Rimmer’s voice comes rising through from the back room, high and vaguely hysterical. “What’s going on—have we got everyone—where’s Lister?”

“All present and accounted for, sir,” Kryten tells him. “Mr. Lister is alive and well.”

“Oh, good—I’m going to kill him.”

As the Cat gets them up into the air, bullets clattering off _Starbug’s_ outer hull, Rimmer comes stalking angrily into the cockpit.

“You imbecile,” Rimmer starts, “you absolute, useless, gibbering simpleton—”

“Not right now, Rimmer,” Lister says as he focuses on adjusting _Starbug_ ’s alignment as the Cat sends it careering down the landing bay towards doors that are currently in the process of closing, as the droids catch onto their hasty escape attempt. “Give me two minutes and then you can shout at me.”

“Pulling a stunt like that,” Rimmer goes on, ignoring Lister’s request completely, “distracting me, bringing the whole place down on us—”

“You’re good to increase thrust, Cat,” Lister says over him. “We’re gonna need more speed to get through before they shut those doors. Rimmer, will you shut up?”

“—complete with a regiment of lunatic Fedex droids—you could’ve jeopardised everything!”

“Hang on,” Lister says loudly, and he lets go of the controls, swinging around in his seat to face Rimmer. “Hang on. I’m not the one who started shouting and got surrounded.”

“Hey, dog-breath, eyes on the prize!” the Cat screeches. “You can sort out your divorce settlement when we’re out of here!”

Lister turns around, but reluctantly, because he knows that Rimmer is not gonna fight fair and is just gonna keep shouting at him, and, sure enough: “I only found myself in that situation because you were being an idiot and I was trying to communicate with you for some incomprehensible reason—”

“Look, Rimmer, no-one put a gun to your head and said you have to pay attention to me—”

“Well, that’s just ridiculous,” Rimmer argues. “Of course I’m going to pay attention to you—you’re—you’re—you’re you! Stupid, reckless, feckless, half-cocked ninnyhammer—you’d get more common sense out of an Alaskan lemon farmer.”

“Clear to engage autopilot, Cat,” he adds, reaching up to flick off the switches overhead.

“Does that mean that I can get out of this pointless conversation?” the Cat asks. “I’m begging you.”

Lister flaps a hand dismissively at him. “Yeah, I’ll hold down the fort for a bit. That is, if Rimmer doesn’t kill me first.”

“I’d like to,” Rimmer threatens.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Anyway, what about the part where I rescued you? Shouldn’t that be _thank you, Lister, for saving my bacon, sorry for being such a colossal smeghead about it_ —”

“No, I am not inclined to thank you, you idiot, because then you went sprinting off the radar and I didn’t know where you were or if you were going to make it back, and your foolhardy brainlessness could’ve got us all killed!”

Lister is about to argue back, but then his brain breaks down what Rimmer has just been saying, and—holy smeg. “Wait,” Lister says, “what was that, Rimmer?”

“I said you could’ve got us all killed!”

“No, before that,” Lister says, and he is smiling so widely that it hurts his face, that big toothy grin that always gets him called hamster cheeks and Slobby Badge Boy Scout, but he doesn’t feel like trying to tamp it down, regardless of what Rimmer might say. “The other bit.”

“What bit?” Rimmer demands, but some of the wind has been taken out of his sails—though, with ears like that, who needs sails? “And will you stop grinning at me, you moron, you look like—”

“The bit where you were worried about me,” Lister says, grin widening further.

Rimmer stares at him, blankly uncomprehending; Lister can almost see him buffering. Then, after a moment, he jerks upright as though pulled up by a string like a marionette. “I—no, I—that’s not—” he objects incoherently. “Was not.”

Lister shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his boiler suit, thoroughly enjoying this. “Oh, I’m afraid you were too.”

“Was not.”

“Were too.”

“Was not!”

"Were smegging too!" Lister says, louder. “Admit it. You got concerned about whether I’d be okay.”

“Concerned about how we’d get your great bloody body bag home, maybe,” Rimmer snaps, but his ears are going red.

“Lister’s so brave and reckless,” Lister says, pressing a hand to his heart. “I wish I could protect him from his overwhelming courage, but it’s just _so_ hard to keep up when he’s rushing off and single-handedly saving the day.”

“You didn’t save the day—you barely even saved yourself!” Rimmer says disparagingly.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” Lister tells him.

“For what?”

“For giving you time to get away from the droids that had you cornered. You’re welcome.”

Rimmer’s mouth opens and closes. Lister can practically see the steam curling from his ears, but after a long moment wrestling with himself, Rimmer grits out, “Thanks.”

“No, no,” Lister says, waving a dismissive hand in a grand gesture of humility, “please, don’t thank me. I was only doing my duty… as a hero.” Then he braces a hand in the slope of his shoulder and winces, exaggerated and over-the top. “Ooh,” he says. “That hurts...”

“What’s wrong? What did you do?” Rimmer asks, losing sight of his annoyance with Lister, even if only for a moment.

“My shoulders… I’ve got this pain,” Lister goes on, with a theatrical groan. “Must just be the burden of carrying this crew.” 

Rimmer’s face flattens into an unimpressed frown. “This is all just one big joke to you, isn’t it?” he accuses.

“Actually, yeah.”

Gradually, Rimmer sinks back to lean against the panelled wall, as if deflating. His angry energy, it seems, has all run out, like air from a punctured tire. “Well,” Rimmer says eventually, and he clears his throat. “Don’t do anything stupid like that again.”

Lister holds his hands up, as though in surrender. “Not making any promises here.” Then, with that, Lister looks up at Rimmer and it’s not quite a smile he gives him but it’s close, and then in his most pompous, stuffed-up, nasally Rimmer impersonation, he says, “Ah. Space.”

Rimmer flips him two fingers and walks out, and Lister can hear him complaining all the way down into the body of the ship— _what an idiot, a salivating buffoon—_ and without meaning to, Lister grins at the stars through the screen.

***

In the months that follow, for a long time not much changes. Bicker, argue, jack off in separate bunks, make stupid jokes, argue again, repeat. Every now and then Lister will mix it up by saying something he regrets, like the time he got tangled up in his own head while they were having a wank together, so that one second he was telling Rimmer how he thinks about him when he’s got a finger up his arse, and the next second it was a jumble of _God, I wish you weren’t dead_ , which is a buzzkill and a half. He spends an embarrassing proportion of his time looking at Rimmer’s mouth and thinking about kissing him, for another thing.

It’s a smegging nightmare, but one that Lister is so accustomed to by now that it’s become old hat. Another day on the tightrope of stubbornly avoiding his own feelings, another day of Rimmer looking at him too long, speaking to him too gently—what else is new?

However, when Rimmer comes back from the holoship, something is different. The others might not notice it, but Lister clocks it the instant that Rimmer rematerialises in their quarters, looking harried and forlorn.

He is unusually quiet, and it takes Kryten pushing and pushing at him to get him to open up about what happened—the holoship, the meeting with the captain, the request for a trial onto the ship’s crew—and even then, Rimmer is withdrawn where Lister would’ve expected him to be smug and insufferable. Then, the further they push, the clearer it becomes what this would mean.

Rimmer wants to leave.

That’s fine. That’s totally, absolutely, one-thousand percent mega fine. Rimmer can do what he wants, and far be it from Lister to tell him how to spend his eternity-long death-days. There’s not much to be said, anyway, as there’s no persuading him otherwise—nothing to convince him that he’s not a worthless failure, nothing to convince him that life is worth living here, or death, or whatever. He’s morose and bitter in a way that Lister hasn’t seen from him in years, not since his dad died, and Lister knows it’s useless to try and stop him. Still, can’t blame a guy for trying.

Kryten has gone away to get the mind-patch set up, and Rimmer is left standing with his arms crossed, looking for all the world like he’s standing by to get all his teeth pulled out. The universe’s most cowardly man is all queued up for a voluntary lobotomy, and there’s not so much as a squeak of complaint from him. It’s a sudden realisation so thoroughly depressing that for a moment Lister is rendered useless by it, trying to figure out what to do when a hologram of a dead person is a suicide risk.

At last, after turning over several inane, pointless conversation openers that would all lead to the same place—hollow silence while both of them avoid talking about it—Lister opens with, “What’s her name?”

“Who?” Rimmer says.

“The girl on-board the holoship who you like,” Lister says. “What’s her name?”

For a moment, Rimmer’s mouth works without any sound coming out. Then, finally, he says, “I don’t see—I don’t—it’s not—relevant to you.”

When Lister only lifts his head and looks at him, a withering look designed to communicate what a twonk Rimmer is being—as though Lister can’t recognise a mile off what Rimmer looks like after a shag. He looks curlier and softer than Lister’s seen in ages, not to mention that he’s got a bruise flirting under the edge of his collar, just shy of the scar on his jaw where for years now Lister has ached to kiss him and maybe leave a mark of his own if he ever got the chance again—and it’s so unfair Lister could burst.

“Yeah,” Lister says, “right. You wanting to leave—that’s got nothing to do with you getting your end away for the first time in three million years, no, nothing to do with that—”

“No, it isn’t, actually!” Rimmer snaps. “I mean, I won’t deny it makes for a compelling argument, but—no, it wasn’t that. I wanted to join them before—before any of that. On that ship, I was normal.”

“What, they gave you a personality transplant as well?”

“I’m serious, Lister,” Rimmer says, and more than anything, it’s that—the stern refusal to get pulled down into immature bickering and name-calling— which sinks like a stone in Lister’s gut. “There’s so much I had forgotten—what it’s like. Someone offered me a drink, and I actually _drank_ it. One of the officers shook my hand. They asked if I was comfortable.”

“Were you?”

“No, I was so nervous I thought I was going to foul the carpet like an incontinent lapdog.” Rimmer drums a finger against his own chest. “But I _mattered_.”

Lister’s chest is tight. “You matter here, man.”

Rimmer laughs, but the sound is hollow. “No, I don’t. Let’s not pretend.”

There is nothing Lister can say to that.

“On that ship, I could be a real person,” Rimmer says, but there is no vehemence in it now. He sounds impossibly tired. “I could have a starring role in my own life, instead of standing on the side-lines watching it happen to somebody else.”

For a long moment, Lister can only look at him. “It really means that much to you?”

Rimmer folds his arms across his chest. “Forget it, Lister, you wouldn’t understand. To eat and drink, to touch, to feel—to be held—”

Christ alive, Lister can’t believe that he passed up on Ace Rimmer for this. For just a second, in a burst of petty, jealous fury, Lister wants to tell him. He even imagines it, interrupting Rimmer to say, _You know, I got a chance to pass you over for something better as well, but I declined. I got the chance to shag a nicer version of you—you, but with a body, and with more than three working brain cells, and with a shred of self-respect, and I turned him down because—I don’t know why. Because of some stupid smegging misguided loyalty to a guy with all the integrity of a wet Weetabix._

Just in time, Lister wrestles the impulse down, because it would be cruel and it would absolutely gut Rimmer, even if right now Lister is fuming and he kind of feels like maybe Rimmer would deserve it—but he’s being unfair. Rimmer is right. Lister doesn’t get it. Lister is alive and still has everything to look forward to, and Rimmer is a snapshot of something static.

“Having hands, it goes without saying,” Rimmer says, “is important to me.”

“Yeah, well.” Lister pushes his hands into his pockets. “Me too.”

It’s a long moment that passes then, where neither of them are saying what they’re thinking, and the air between them stretches taut. Maybe Lister doesn’t get it, maybe he never will, but when he looks at Rimmer, frazzled and frizzy-haired and looking totally desperate, Lister thinks he’s not a thousand miles off-base to say that it feels like awful’s ugly cousin.

“Well,” Rimmer says. “That’s that.”

Lister leans one shoulder against the wall. “Sure.”

There is silence.

Rimmer says, after a moment, voice quiet, “So, are you—I mean. Aren’t you going to say anything?”

Lister sighs. “Alright, Rimmer. Whatever you want—go for it. Leave, if you want. I won’t stop you.”

Whatever Rimmer had wanted to hear from Lister, it wasn’t that. His mouth flattens into a tight line and he’s not shouting and raving like usual, but somehow this seems worse.

“Right,” Rimmer says stiffly.

“Right.”

With that, Rimmer straightens his jacket in brisk, jerky movements, and then strides out.

“We need to interview for someone to fill Rimmer’s place,” Lister announces to the rest of the crew just over five minutes after he’s gone, bringing in a heavy crate full of the ship’s old holodiscs and dumping it on the table with a crash. “I reckon we start by going through the officers first.”

“Why?” Kryten asks, looking baffled.

“Well, we could find someone with useful skills—or at least marginally more useful than alphabetising health and safety forms—that could help us get back to Earth.”

“No, I meant why do we need to replace Mr. Rimmer?” Kryten asks. “I don’t mean to sound callous, but exactly which duties did Mr. Rimmer perform that are so essential as to need replacing?”

For several seconds, Lister just stands there, both hands still braced on either side of the holodisc crate. “Well,” he says eventually, and gets no further.

“The guy was as much use as a perforated condom,” the Cat says. “You might as well replace him with a mouldy cantaloupe.”

“Perhaps not the most apt analogy,” Kryten muses. “At least rotting fruit could briefly provide the room with some fragrant atmosphere.”

There must be a counter-argument to this, but right now Lister is coming up blank. All he knows is that he can’t bear the idea of just sitting here, twiddling his thumbs for the next few hours, while he waits to find out if Rimmer will ever be coming back. He decides, then, that actually, he doesn’t need to justify himself. Last human being alive—he can do what he likes, and there is no-one who can stop him.

With that conclusion, Lister drums both hands on the lids of the crate, and then pries it open.

“So,” he starts conversationally, as though that previous diversion had never happened, “I’m thinking we start with the navigation officers and go from there—and I say we start with the women.”

Anything to keep busy, even an endless stream of prim, middle-class toffs more interested in opera and polo than hearing any of Lister’s armpit-fart renditions of Celine Dion. His belching of Yankee-Doodle Dandy falls totally flat, and his joke about the pregnant woman and the lightbulb doesn’t so much as get a smile out of a single one of them. It’s demoralising, to say the least, and doesn’t even do the job of taking Lister’s mind off what’s happening on the holoship—all it means is that every potential gets weighed on the mega-skewed scales of Arnold Judas Rimmer and comes up short.

Rimmer would’ve laughed at his joke, even if it was just a reluctant chuckle and then a disapproving lecture afterwards. Rimmer would’ve begrudgingly agreed to play Strip Go Fish. Rimmer would’ve—and then there he is, frenzied and demanding help, and Lister is so glad to see him that it feels like a hard lump in his stomach.

The Cat needs no convincing to let him go; Kryten is compelled to do as he’s told regardless of his feelings on it, although he doesn’t seem too torn up over it; in fact, Lister seems to be the only one who gives a smeg.

So Rimmer goes, and he wins, against all odds, and he gets all togged up in his spangly red and gold to rival the Cat’s fashion sense and they say goodbye.

Rimmer looks unfairly handsome, the holoship’s uniform closely fitted and flattering, making him all at once somehow taller and broader and more confident, and Lister folds his arms and hates every second of it. He’s made up for Rimmer, of course he is, because now he can be real and he can feel like his existence is purposeful, and he can get to have mind-blowing sex ten times a day with a whole corps of bendy, brilliant officers, and if, as collateral damage, Lister gets left behind feeling gutted by the whole stupid ordeal, well.

It doesn’t last long.

Within an evening, Rimmer is back among the Dwarfers on _Starbug_ in his usual uniform, and they have a curry, followed by some high-sugar pudding concoction that Lister got Kryten to make, to try and make the evening feel like a bit of an occasion, and Rimmer sits at the table with his arms folded and he watches them eat.

Midway through a bite of fruit trifle, Lister sees Rimmer’s gaze lost in the middle distance, quiet and dejected, and Lister asks, “You alright, Rimmer?”

Rimmer blinks and looks over. “What?”

“Are you alright?” Lister repeats, more slowly this time.

“Just peachy, thank you.”

“No, this is raspberry,” Kryten says, and guffaws. Nobody else laughs, least of all Rimmer. Kryten looks down at his own plate, abashed. “Sorry, sirs. I think my Tact Circuit was briefly disconnected.”

Lister slaps Kryten on the back good-naturedly. “You’re fine, Krytes. Trifle’s great, by the way.”

That would usually be Rimmer’s cue—for a rant about how he’s glad they’re all so amused by the fact that he’s dead, and how it’s bad enough to be made entirely of light without having to deal with snide comments about it, and the lack of respect for the dearly departed is astounding, and on and on and on—and Rimmer misses it.

Perhaps unconsciously, they all look towards him in expectation.

Rimmer says nothing.

“Phew,” the Cat says. “For a second there I really worried that he wasn’t gonna be able to take a joke!”

Lister sighs. “Cat, man—”

Without a word, Rimmer gets up and leaves the table.

He walks clean through his own chair, and his arm partly swings through Kryten, but at least he still uses the door, because the day Rimmer starts gliding through walls like a ghost will be the day when Lister starts bulk-buying straitjackets. 

“What’s his problem?” the Cat demands. “He’s killing my buzz.”

Lister shakes his head. He makes quick work scraping up the last of his trifle, thanks Kryten again, and then goes to find Rimmer.

Unsurprisingly, he finds him in their sleeping quarters, but where he might have expected him to be dictating lists of things that need health-and-safety checks, or preening in the mirror and adjusting his H, or at least pretending to be asleep—he’s just… sitting there. On the edge of the bottom bunk, he sits with his hands hanging loose and dejected between his knees, and he stares down at the floor.

“Heya, Rimmer,” Lister says, and he comes to sit down beside him on the bunk. “So,” he says, “do you want to talk about what happened?”

Rimmer heaves a sigh like he’s winching it up from the bottom of a well. “No,” he says, and does anyway. “Commander Crane—the, erm—the girl—she was my opponent. Withdrew to let me win, essentially sacrificed herself for my happiness.”

Lister raises his eyebrows. “Nice of her,” he says. “Usually they don’t even call you back.”

“Tell me about it,” Rimmer says glumly. “Just my luck—I get stuck with the idiot drippy enough to fall in love with me and tank my one chance at a good life. I couldn’t just ruin my own damn chances, oh no.”

“Come on, even you can’t be that resentful.”

“Watch me.”

Lister rolls his eyes.

“I couldn’t be the selfish one there after that. So… I gave it all up. Got her reinstated and I came crawling back to this putrid cesspit.”

“Yeah, welcome back. We missed you, too.”

Rimmer is quiet for so long then that Lister wonders if his light-bee has crashed. “She was willing to throw away everything for me,” he says. “Her whole life. Her career. Everything. It seems silly, then, for me to be quibbling over the little things here.” He looks at Lister.

Side by side, they sit close enough that their knees would knock if they could touch. Each of them has his hands planted solidly on their own thighs, pinky to pinky, almost. Lister only looks at Rimmer’s mouth for a split-second, one stupid unthinking instant, but it’s enough.

Rimmer ducks his head.

“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” Lister admits awkwardly. “Even if you’re not.”

“Oh, really?” Rimmer says, disbelief evident in both his voice and face. “None of the replacement holograms up to scratch?”

“Yeah, none of them were neurotic or useless enough,” Lister says. “One guy was genuinely pretty keen on seeking out danger, so he was dead wrong.”

Rimmer tuts, but it’s not entirely bad-tempered.

“Anyway, having a body isn’t all it’s held up to be,” Lister adds. “Think—three million years since you’ve had a runny nose, or a bad belly, or a tooth-ache. No more worrying about if you smell, or—”

“Excuse me,” Rimmer interrupts, “but when precisely have you ever given a hoot about your body odour?”

“Alright, I don’t, but I know you do—look, the point I’m making is that, okay, you miss out on some good stuff, but you also get to dodge a few bullets as well.”

“I would take getting kneed in the balls every single day for the rest of my life if I could have sex again.”

Lister frowns. “If you were getting kneed in the balls every day, I don’t think you’d be able to, anyway.”

Rimmer pulls a face.

Lister doesn’t know if he’s helped at all, or just made the whole situation ten times worse, but he doesn’t want to just gloss over what’s happened. He pulls his locs over his shoulder and fiddles with the ends rather than look at Rimmer, and he says, “For what it’s worth—I dunno. Commander Crane… I reckon she’d have been lucky to have you. If it had worked out.”

Rimmer looks over at him. Lister only risks a glance in his direction and regrets it, because Rimmer looks totally gutted by that, cracked open, his mouth a thin line, the quiet, hopeless yearning in his face enough to close off Lister’s throat, because he can’t a hundred percent guarantee that it’s Commander Crane in Rimmer’s head right now. It was a stupid thing to say.

“Sorry,” Lister says. “I know that doesn’t help anything.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Rimmer says.

Lister flips his locs back over his shoulder, scrubs both hands over his face. “I wish—” he starts helplessly, and gets no further.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Rimmer says.

Lister looks at him. “Yeah?”

“Indeed.”

“Oh, ey,” Lister says in low wonder. “I thought I’d kept that one under my hat pretty well.”

Rimmer snorts. “Absolutely not.”

“Aw, hell,” Lister groans. “Alright, that’s embarrassing.”

“It is,” Rimmer agrees, and Lister knocks him with his shoulder—or tries to, with the usual result. Rimmer sways with it anyway, like he felt the impact, with a little breathless laugh. 

The two of them are a pair of idiots and Lister knows it, but the relief he feels is complete and overwhelming at the knowledge that Rimmer isn’t going anywhere.

“You and me, man,” Lister says, and for a long time, he gets no further, but Rimmer looks like he gets it.

***


	8. Red Quilted

**VIII**

In Lister’s defence, he really thought he’d remember where he parked it. Also, he’s sure he did turn the tracking device on, and if he didn’t that’s only because Rimmer was dicking about with the controls and getting in a flap so that Lister couldn’t think straight, and anyway, why does it always have to be his responsibility to remember where he parked _Red Dwarf?_

However, none of these defences hold much water with the others, and so he’s in the doghouse while they dejectedly stake out every planetoid in the desperate hope that one of these weeks they’ll catch a glimpse of their old ship sailing round in orbit… but so far, no such luck.

Of course, Rimmer is insufferable about it.

“Oh, Listy, be careful with that,” he calls when Lister is carrying his food through from the kitchen. “I’d hate for you to lose track of your curry en route to your mouth.”

“I’m not gonna lose my curry,” Lister scoffs, pausing halfway across the room. “How the smeg would I even manage that while I’m eating it?”

“I don’t know—how do you lose a mining ship the size of a small moon while you’re driving it?”

“Look, you know that remote piloting is no good,” Lister points out. “You said it yourself—it’s like trying to wrestle a well-oiled barracuda.”

“Only a fool blames his tools,” Rimmer says sagely.

The Cat looks up from his magazine. “You’re a tool—can we blame you?”

Rimmer’s nose wrinkles with contempt, and Lister is just enjoying laughing at him until he goes to sit down, overbalances, and slops half his vindaloo down his front. He looks slowly from the mess to Rimmer’s open look of delight, and he points a fork in Rimmer’s face. “Don’t.”

It’s hopeless trying to tell Rimmer to do anything.

Nowadays, Lister would be reluctant to say that things between him and Rimmer are back to normal—with them, there is no normal—but when they argue these days there’s mostly no malice in it, and Rimmer only calls Lister a repulsive gimboid three or four times a day, and sometimes when Kryten is going mental Lister and Rimmer’s eyes will meet in a moment of amused, helpless solidarity, like _how the smeg did we get here,_ and _how are_ we _the most sane ones in this feckless group of morons_ , and it’s not quite a smile on Rimmer’s mouth but it’s somewhere close.

Sometimes they’ll play Guess the Famous Arse and Rimmer will agree to be on Lister’s team, with his unmatched ability to pinpoint Clint Eastwood at thirty paces; sometimes they end up lying awake until stupid o’clock, when Lister starts throwing pillows and begging Rimmer to shut the smeg up; sometimes Lister will hear the mattress creaking in the bunk below and he’ll start making inane conversation as though he’s totally oblivious to what’s going on down there, until Rimmer knuckles under and chokes out a strangled _Lister_ and tells him to either be quiet or say something interesting—and Lister has got plenty interesting to say. Then, in the morning, Rimmer shouts at him about his dirty socks, about leaving the cap off his putrid aftershave, about squeezing toothpaste from the middle and shaking the shaving cream upside down, and Lister calls Rimmer a pedantic, petty, pathetic little twonk, and Rimmer asks if he kisses his cousins with that mouth, and the Cat tells them both to pipe down, and if that isn’t exactly normal—well. Lister’ll take it.

They haven’t really discussed this—whatever _this_ is—and Lister’s reluctant to tread any closer to wobbly ground. If Rimmer’s gonna stick his head in the sand, then Lister supposes that for now he’ll just be sitting around in the sandpit and waiting for him to come up.

Or suffocate.

Either way, problem’s solved.

At the moment, however, much of their time is given over to tracking _Red Dwarf_ ’s ever waning signal, and frantically chasing it across deep space, while the gap between them gradually widens. None of them have given voice to the possibility that they might never get the ship back, for fear of jinxing it, and in the meantime they’re full steam ahead, twenty-four hours a day, sleeping in shifts so that someone is always manning the helm to keep up the pace and keep a weather eye out for _Red Dwarf_.

Lister is several hours into his night-shift in the driver’s seat of _Starbug_ when he hears familiar footsteps coming up the steps behind him, and he swivels his chair to see Rimmer ducking his head through the doorway.

“Evening,” Lister says, rubbing at his eyes with one hand.

Rimmer leans against the wall of the cockpit, arms folded. Every now and then, a light on the panels will flash orange or green, translucently visible through Rimmer’s projection. “Crashed the ship yet?” Rimmer asks.

“Hm, not yet.” Lister lifts his arms over his head and stretches til his bones crack. “Thought I’d wait til you got here so I could frame you.”

Rimmer snorts a derisive laugh and shakes his head. “Good luck with that. Can’t touch anything, remember?”

“Yeah,” Lister says, hands falling to rest in his lap. “Rings a bell.”

He doesn’t mean for his voice to sound like that—soft. Rimmer looks at him and says nothing, and for a long moment, there is only the low hum of _Starbug_ ’s engines and the intermittent beeping of its scanner between them. He looks comfortable, warm, sleep-rumpled in his dressing gown and slippers. In the low light of the cockpit, illuminated only faintly by the panels and buttons on the walls and dashboard, Rimmer looks less opaque than usual. Cruelly, his H looks like the most solid thing about him. Lister knows, on a rational level, that if he were to reach out and try to touch him, his hand would pass straight through—but it doesn’t stop him wanting.

Lister’s eyes drop, at last, and he turns back to face outwards, back to space and the stars and all the stupid smegging things he’s supposed to be paying attention while he’s manning the controls.

Rimmer takes a deep breath, and he pushes himself off the wall. “How long are you on shift?”

Lister swivels back in his seat to check the clock embedded in the control panel. “Two more hours, give or take,” he says. “Though it’ll take yonks to get the Cat out of bed, so let’s call it two and a half.”

“Didn’t know you knew fractions. I’m proud of you, Listy.”

“Eat smeg, Rimmer.”

“When I’m able to eat anything, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

Lister’s eyebrows lift, his lips lifting in a smirk. “Oh, you promise?”

It takes Rimmer a second, a frown creasing his forehead as his brain works, and then he twigs it. “I meant—I was just—oh, shut up.” He rolls his eyes, but there is colour rising in his cheeks. “Git.”

Lister revolves back to the front, laughing. “You make it too easy, man.”

“You’re one to talk,” Rimmer shoots back.

Lister grins. “Why, you got another naan going?”

“You know, I resent that.”

“Oh yeah, add it to the list, then. Naan bread—you can file that between my dirty socks and the cup of mould on the side table.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The file is alphabetised—it’ll be between mould, comma, cup of, and pen-nib-used-to-dig-out-earwax.”

“That was one time,” Lister protests. “And only because I couldn’t find your compass.”

“Why would you be using my compass? It’s very sharp and delicate, Lister, you could have burst your eardrum, or worse still, damaged the compass.”

“It’s not like you use it anyway. You never get to the maths section of the astro-nav exam—you always fall down at the first hurdle of writing your name on the front of paper without throwing up.”

“I’m surprised you even know what a compass is for.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I know it was maths I got kicked out of for stabbing my mate Steve McIrney in the hand.”

“What for?” Rimmer exclaims.

Lister shrugs. “Just thought it’d be a laugh.”

Rimmer shakes his head. “Unbelievable. You’re a walking stereotype, you know that?”

Lister frowns. “Well, what am I meant to do, crawl?”

There is a high-pitched beep three times from the control panel, and Lister turns back round in his chair to investigate. A small red light is flashing on the main computer screen.

“Smeg,” he says under his breath.

“What is it?” Rimmer says, stepping in closer to look over Lister’s shoulder. “What does that light mean—fuel? Oxygen?”

“No, the timer’s run out for me to make my next move in Minesweeper,” Lister says ruefully. “It’s made me forfeit the match. Damnit.”

Rimmer tuts. “Well, I’m glad to see that we’re leaving our lives in your capable hands.”

“Look, there’s nothing out there,” Lister protests. “I mean, have you seen the map for this sector?” He points across the panel to a blank black screen on the co-pilot’s side. “Look at that.”

“You’ve not turned the screen on.”

“The screen is on,” Lister says. “That’s just what it looks like out here.”

Rimmer says, “Ah.”

“Yeah, it’s gripping stuff, man.” Lister sits back heavily in his chair and he lets his breath out, long and slow. He has spent far too long already hunched over these controls, staring into the endless darkness of space, tensed up and waiting for something to happen. He rubs at his shoulder, trying to dispel the ache building there. It’s only a sharp pain when he turns his head too far to the side, otherwise just a dull, slow throb. His hand slows, then stills, coming to rest on the top of his shoulder.

Then Rimmer reaches out haltingly, and he sets his own hand over Lister’s. Sort of. Partly through Lister’s, if he doesn’t angle it right. Logically, Lister knows that Rimmer is just holding his hand in a weird mid-air hover to create the illusion of being able to touch—but as far as illusions go, Lister’ll take it. Rimmer’s hand over his hand, and if he concentrates, he can almost imagine what that might feel like, the weight of Rimmer’s palm over his knuckles, the slow dry scuff of his thumb over the back of Lister’s wrist.

Lister tilts his head back against the headrest, nearer to where Rimmer is standing, and he looks up at Rimmer, looming upside down over him.

“This isn’t a good angle for you,” Lister says, after a moment of deliberation. “I didn’t think your nostrils could get any bigger.”

“Thanks,” Rimmer says. “Any other critiques while you’re here?”

“Ooh, don’t tip your head down. Big double-chin coming in there.”

“And what, pray tell, am I supposed to do about that? Hack my head off at the jaw to create a more pleasing silhouette?”

Lister grins. “Aw, will you really?”

“Certainly. The very day that Stevie Wonder takes off his glasses and says, _only joking_!”

Lister rolls his eyes. He pats his own shoulder twice, telling himself that it’s the warm back of Rimmer’s hand he feels, rather than the cold leather of his own jacket, and returns his attention to _Starbug_ ’s controls. “You’ve not got to be up for hours yet,” he tells Rimmer. “Go back to bed.”

“And leave you to steer us into an asteroid belt? Hardly.” Rimmer stretches. “I’ll hang about until you’re off, if it’s all the same to you.”

Lister pulls a face, but inwardly—result. He gestures loosely to the co-pilot’s chair. “Go on, then,” he says, and then taps the top of the monitor. “Twenty big ones says you can’t top my Minesweeper score.”

***

There is an idea—a ridiculous, totally bonkers idea—that Lister can’t shake no matter how hard he tries. It follows him, from room to room; on the days when he wakes up in his own bunk, it’s the first thing on his mind; on the days when he wakes up in Rimmer’s, it makes it to top three. So sue him, Lister’s priorities get a little messy when he’s faced with Rimmer’s grumpy refusal to acknowledge the alarm clock, his hair disastrous, his over-starched pyjamas forming weird creases against his skin, and Lister does remember that he can’t actually touch him, but barely, and it’s not for want of trying.

The idea is this: what if there is a way to touch Rimmer, after all?

It wouldn’t be perfect, obviously, and Lister doesn’t want to get his hopes up, but if it’s even remotely close to possible, then it’s worth a shot. Broaching the subject with Rimmer is trickier, though, and it takes Lister a week or so since the inception of the idea to actually pluck up the courage to mention it.

“Rimmer,” he says. “I have a question.”

“Have you checked it against the Stupid Questions List?” Rimmer asks, without so much as looking up from his book.

Lister glances balefully at the checklist that is tacked to the bunk-room wall, where Rimmer has been for some time now cataloguing Lister’s moments of idiocy to, quote, _safeguard the future from unnecessary stupidity_ , end quote. Just from one glimpse, Lister can see a couple of highlights, such as, _Do you think I could eat/drink/ingest [insert toxic substance here’] and survive? ANSWER: No, but bon appetit._

“No,” Lister says. “I mean—yes. No, it’s not on the list. It’s something different. Rimmer, I’ve been thinking.”

Rimmer’s eyes flick up to Lister apprehensively. “That’s always dangerous.”

Lister ignores this, steels himself, and carries on. “I’ve been thinking—about, well. About you, me, and the AR machine.”

That gets Rimmer’s attention. He lifts his head. “What about it?”

Lister folds his arms across his chest. “Rimmer, man, tell me I don’t have to spell this out for you.”

Rimmer blinks several times, so quickly it almost looks like he’s crashed. “What, you mean—”

“There we go.”

For a moment, Rimmer is speechless, seemingly floored by the suggestion. Lister can practically hear the cogs turning between his ears, and can’t help wondering what is going on in that thick skull of his, but when Rimmer finally does speak, the first thing he says, idiotically, is, “But… it’s unhygienic.”

“I’ll bring a wet wipe.”

Rimmer hesitates. “And it wouldn’t be real.”

Dragging a hand down over his face, Lister lets out a long sigh, exasperated. “Give me a break, Rimmer. Neither is any of this. I hate to break this to you, but you’re dead.”

“Oh, am I?”

Lister decides not to stoop to bickering with his stupid sarcasm. “This is as good as it’s gonna get. At least you’ll be able to feel something. At least I’ll be able to touch you.”

“All you’ll be able to touch is a hologram.”

Lister raises his eyebrows, wondering if Rimmer can hear what a massive dickhead he’s being. “God forbid,” he says sarcastically.

“I mean, in the computer. In the AR system. It isn’t me.”

“Neither is this,” Lister says, and to emphasise the point, he picks up a pen from the table and tosses it, underarm, through the centre of Rimmer’s chest. To his credit, Rimmer only barely flinches, but he still looks decidedly unhappy, his mouth pressed small. “Why are you so hung up on this?”

“Well, it’s hardly the first time you’ve done this, is it?”

Lister frowns. “What are you on about?”

“Come off it, you practically live in that AR sometimes. I’ve seen the state of it when you get out, what you leave for Kryten to clear up. This is old hat for you, shagging computer projections.”

“You’re a computer projection,” Lister points out.

“Yes, and if the choice is me or a film noir buxom blonde, I imagine it’ll be a struggle for the ages! On one hand, you’ve got 1920s beauty with a bosom you could suffocate in, or—and let’s be fair to me, here—the reanimated corpse of a smegging idiot.”

Lister understands, then. If he can get it off with any old computer projection, why on Earth would he pick Rimmer? It’s a good question, to be fair.

Originally, he started this up with Rimmer for stupid reasons—curiosity and boredom, back before the accident; loneliness and a lack of other options, more recently—but now that they’ve got access to the AR machine, it stands to reason that he doesn’t need Rimmer anymore. Maybe it would be different if Rimmer was alive and had a real, tangible body, but he doesn’t. Getting to touch him properly is a ridiculous pipe dream, and if that’s Lister has been holding out for, then smeg knows he needs to dream bigger.

Rationally, his brain goes through all this, computes it, understands it, files it away somewhere for future reference, and yet he is still standing there staring at Rimmer.

Oh, Jesus smegging Christ.

He’d pick Rimmer.

Why? _Why?_ A man who irons his underpants, who lists one of his greatest accomplishments as devising a waist holster for his pencil case, who genuinely, earnestly likes Morris dancing. A man with the charisma of a wasp, whose idea of a good time is meticulously overseeing the skutters wipe the skirting board. No way.

But it’s true, and it dawns on Lister now, his stomach sinking like he’s just received a terminal diagnosis, because it can’t get much worse than this. Trapped at the end of the universe, three million years from Earth, the last human being alive, and the cherry on top is that for some reason he’s in love with Arnold Rimmer.

Over his dead body is he telling Rimmer that, though.

Lister wipes a hand over his face and lets his breath out in one long sigh. “Look, man. I’m down if you are, but no-one’s forcing you.”

Rimmer crosses his arms and avoids looking at Lister. “If you clear off with some other projection while we’re in there—”

“Then you can put me in the airlock and flush me out.”

Rimmer considers this. “I wouldn’t be able to get you in the airlock in the first place,” he mutters after a beat. “No body, remember?”

Lister rolls in his eyes. “I’ll walk in and wait.”

Rimmer is quiet for a moment. “Alright,” he begrudges at last. He points an accusatory finger into Lister’s face. “You promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to get flushed into space,” Lister says with the straightest face he can muster. “Happy?”

Judging by the expression on Rimmer’s face, that’s a no—but he stops complaining, and he does look like he’s at least on-board with the plan. “Fine. Sure. Yes, let’s—fine.” He lifts his head towards the corner of the room where a computer screen is mounted. “Holly, can you patch me in?” he asks. “Then—erm. Take a hike for fifteen minutes or so.”

Lister raises a hand. “Hol—make that an hour.”

Rimmer’s eyebrows lift, and then he vanishes. 

Lister grins at that. He crosses to the AR machine and starts hooking himself in.

***

It takes Lister a long time to even find him—the game is set in a gritty dystopian metropolis, all neon lights and pools of blood drying under broken street lamps, and the streets are deserted. He feels he can hardly go around asking _excuse me, have you seen player two,_ and anyway, there’s no one here to ask. So he wanders, aimlessly at first, hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat—yep, the game has him wearing a smegging trenchcoat—which doesn’t even do anything to hold off the drizzling mist. Eventually, he passes an empty taxi with the windows down and the radio blaring. _Local do-gooder foils the South Street bandits yet again,_ the voice crackles. _Who is the mysterious vigilante keeping this corner of Metropolopia safe?_

Lister finds himself heading that way. The game must be giving him this information for a reason. He’ll know Rimmer when he sees him, he reassures himself. Even if he’s in a different body, in a different time, Lister would know Rimmer anywhere. Not least because he’ll probably be the one running his gob at someone twice his size and then looking for back-up.

Funnily enough, it doesn’t happen like that. Lister can’t find hide nor hair of him in any of the vigilante’s favourite haunts, and as the drizzle thickens to a relentless, driving rain, Lister finds a bar stool to dry himself out on. He hasn’t even managed to get the bartender’s attention for a pint when the pub door swings open again.

Lister turns in his seat, and there he is.

Tall, slim, narrow thighs, long fingers loosening the top button of his coat. His hair, reduced by the rain to a damp mop of hopeless curls, falling far enough over the H on his forehead that Lister can pretend he’s alive, even if only for a moment. He looks stupidly, ridiculously, insufferably handsome, Lister realises, throat tightening, and he knows instantly that he needs to keep that thought locked well smegging down or he’ll never hear the end of it.

“Lister,” Rimmer says as he makes his way over, “we’ve cocked this up somehow. I think I’m meant to be some kind of superhero. So far I’ve run into two different batty old ladies being mugged, and one man at knife-point, and I only walked the length of one street. I didn’t know what to do, so I just apologised and let them get on with it.”

Lister shakes his head. “God, I’ve seen jellyfish with more spine,” he remarks, but he can feel that he is still smiling. “Still, at least you’re consistent. Drink?”

Lister gets a lager with Rimmer’s pinot spritzer, but there must be something in the game that pumps up the intensity and speed with which it hits them, so that Lister is barely sucking the glass and already feels limp and limbless, and Rimmer has developed a noticeable sideways lean.

Lister reaches across the table for Rimmer’s glass to get his attention, not really thinking—“Another round?” he asks—and his fingertips brush over Rimmer’s knuckles on the wine-glass stem.

It’s only in the instant that Lister makes contact that he twigs that this is the first time he’s touched Rimmer in three million years, and it jolts through Lister like a static shock. Rimmer’s eyes snap up to meet Lister’s, round and dark and uncertain, and Lister doesn’t know what to do from here, where to go. He stalls, hand awkwardly suspended between them. He can touch Rimmer. He can get his hands on him.

Across the table, Rimmer swallows. His eyes flick to Lister’s mouth and away. His thumb fidgets on the base of the glass. “Erm. No—no, I’m fine,” he says, although he sounds less than convinced. “I’m alright. Thank you.”

It’s probably the politest Lister’s heard him, his voice quiet and slightly strangled, but Lister is in no position to take the piss, what with his heart knocking against his ribs like it’s trying to make a break for it. “Yeah?” Lister says. He drums his fingers arrhythmically on the greasy table top, and tilts his head over, towards the stairway at the back and the private rooms beyond. With confidence he doesn’t feel, he adds, “You wanna do this, then?”

Beneath the table, Rimmer’s right leg is jiggling so aggressively that the glasses on the table rattle.

“You alright?” Lister checks. “We don’t—”

“Come on, then,” Rimmer says, loud and abrupt, and he jerks up from his seat like he’s planning to catapult himself into space in the same manoeuvre. The manic energy shifts from his jiggling leg to a restless, almost frenetic shifting of his hands. He rakes a hand back through his hair in an attempt to fix it and makes it a million times worse.

“Hey. Rimmer,” Lister says, and stands up. “Relax.”

“I am relaxed,” Rimmer says. He isn’t. He looks like Lister feels, and that’s saying something.

In a moment of lager-bolstered courage, Lister does the unthinkable. He takes a deep breath, and he reaches out to offer Rimmer his hand.

Rimmer doesn’t move. He looks briefly baffled by it, staring.

“Come on, you coward,” Lister says, gently, and then Rimmer takes his hand.

Dry skin slides over skin. The warmth and smoothness of it, the ridges of delicate metacarpals flexing under the skin, those long graceful fingers—and every inch of him fizzing unsteadily beneath Lister’s touch like he’s carrying an electrical charge all through his body.

It’s not like touching someone real, more like an impression of it, like fingertips pressed into cooling wax and leaving the prints behind. Lister can hold onto the sensation if he concentrates—Rimmer’s skin, the bones beneath, the flutter of his pulse, because here he’s alive, he’s alive—but now and then, he wavers like bad radio signal. Lister can’t tell if the static charge is something sexy or something going wrong in AR, but either way it makes the backs of his teeth ache.

Rimmer tenses, shoulders hiking up near his ears, and he looks down at their clasped hands. The only sound between them is their breathing, just slightly out of sync but not by much. The pad of Lister’s thumb rolls over Rimmer’s knuckles, clumsy, reassuring. Rimmer’s hand shifts, half-turning over in Lister’s grip, and his little finger grazes a slow path along the inside of Lister’s wrist. His fingertip drags over Lister’s pulse-point.

In the original plan, Lister meant to use that hand to pull Rimmer up the stairs, to lead him somewhere more private where they can get away from the prying eyes of nosy computer sprites, but things don’t work out that way.

Lister tugs him in by the hand, here in the middle of a bar that isn’t real, and he gets hold of the front of Rimmer’s shirt to pull his head down to his level, and he kisses him.

Rimmer makes a helpless sound against Lister’s lips and then his hands are on Lister’s hips, and Lister’s mouth opens for him—but something isn’t quite right. It’s not like when he’s other in-game projections in the AR suite; Rimmer’s mouth is filled with electricity that makes Lister’s face numb, like a static shock that bites hot in his fillings and makes his head buzz. He perseveres through the sensation of what feels like his teeth crackling; he lets go of Rimmer’s shirt and slides that hand instead around Rimmer’s side, over his ribs, his skin fizzing.

He tries to ignore it, but it’s an electrical charge that builds and builds, and not in a sexy way. Rimmer’s fingers are tense, digging in, and that seems to make it worse until he almost feels like it’s sparking in the marrow of his bones. Kissing Rimmer is gradually becoming less of an enjoyable experience and more of an endurance test.

Lister pulls back for a moment, licks his lips while he re-evaluates, and Rimmer meets his eyes. His face looks how Lister feels—uncertain, frustrated, disappointed.

“You alright?” Lister checks.

Rimmer’s mouth twists. “Yeah, just—bit like snogging a battery, to be honest.”

“Why isn’t this working?” Lister can’t understand it. He’s done this before and never had a problem—but then again, he’s never done it with Rimmer patched in. He’s always gone for a projection already programmed into the game, a simulated chorus of pixels in the shape of a woman, or on one very disappointing occasion, the shape of a tall, thin white bloke with a frown. This is all new territory, and even if Holly can patch Rimmer in to experience the game, he can’t make it real for either of them.

Disappointment brims in Lister’s chest like cold water, but he doesn’t want to give up yet.

“Come here,” he murmurs to Rimmer, “just—” and he pulls Rimmer into him again. He tries to throw himself into it, tries to ignore the fact that Rimmer feels more than a little bit like how he imagines it would feel to stick his tongue into a plug socket. 

There is renewed energy in Rimmer, as well. He steps in closer until he’s pressed against the length of Lister’s body, except somehow that just makes the static worse, and when Rimmer’s mouth opens under Lister’s, a tension headache starts flirting at the back of Lister’s skull. Lister hisses through his teeth, and he hopes that maybe Rimmer will think it’s just a sexy noise and keep going, because God, he just wants to get off with Rimmer for once. Just one smegging time, he wants things to go right for them.

As if.

Rimmer pulls back with a grimace. “Lister, I’m sorry, but I have to be honest. I am really not enjoying this.”

“It’s crap, isn’t it?” Lister bursts out. He sags at the spine in relief as Rimmer lets him go, and it’s only when the blood starts returning to his fingertips and toes that he realises that he’s got pins and needles through most of his body. “Smegging hell,” Lister says, shaking out his hands and cracking his knuckles. “Good idea—I don’t think I could’ve kept it up much longer.”

Rimmer sighs. “Well, that was a waste of time. Do you want to just—” He gestures crudely with one tunnelled hand, and Lister recoils, nose wrinkling.

“No way, I’m not just settling for a wank. We can do that anywhere—hell, we can do that in our bunks, and it’d be a hell of a lot easier to clean up in there as well.”

Rimmer pulls a face of reluctant agreement. “Alright, so now what?”

“Hang on, I’m thinking.”

“Any second now.”

“I’m thinking!”

Rimmer sighs. “Look, Lister if you want to just—go off with another projection—”

Lister laughs without humour. “What, and go on a brisk walk through outer space? Nah, I’m alright, cheers.”

Rimmer shakes his head. “It’s fine, I won’t hold you to your promise, I swear. You can go off with someone else. It’s fine.”

Lister grimaces. “Nah, you’re alright, actually. I’ll stay here.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah. Or…” Lister hesitates. “Actually, what if you went off with someone else, instead?”

Rimmer stares at him. “You want _me_ to go and have sex with someone else?” he says, slowly, like he’s checking that he understands the suggestion.

“Well, I was thinking… I could come with you. I could—tell them what to do.”

“What, like—”

“Yeah.”

“That seems… unconventional.”

“I mean, yeah. But you’re dead, so nothing about this is exactly _Casablanca_.”

Rimmer is quiet for so long that Lister worries briefly that he’s somehow broken him, fried his software or something. His throat works. He swallows. Then, carefully, he says, “I don’t think I’d be very good at that.”

Lister frowns. “What, sex?”

Rimmer just looks at him. No spitting fury, no blustery indignation, and that’s how Lister knows Rimmer’s not dicking about in the least. “Putting on a show,” he says at last. “I don’t think I could.”

“Rimmer, you wouldn’t need to. I wouldn’t be there for the smegging opera, man, I’d be there for you. All you’ve got to do is enjoy yourself.”

“So what’s the catch?”

“What catch?”

“You wouldn’t get anything out of it,” Rimmer says, staring at Lister like he thinks he’s got one working brain cell, and Lister’s fairly certain that’s the exact same look that he’s sending back.

“Well, I like to think I might be at least _slightly_ interested in it. So?”

“So what?”

“So do you want to do it or not?”

Rimmer hesitates. “Would I get to choose who we—”

“Whoever you like.”

“A woman,” Rimmer says, instantly, decisively.

Lister blinks. “Really?”

Rimmer’s face turns sour and prim. “Yes, really.”

“Alright, we’ll stay in your comfort zone.”

“Comfort zone?” Rimmer echoes. “I’ve been more comfortable on a rusty tandem bike sans seat. I’ve had bouts of appendicitis more comfortable than this, woman or not.”

“Rimmer, do you need a table to climb under?”

“No. Let’s just get this over with.”

“Call me crazy, but that’s not really the attitude that I’m going for, here. We don’t have to, you know. We can—I don’t know, log off and play Risk or something.”

“A tempting offer, Lister, but I want to do this. Besides, last time I was this fired-up and frustrated without an outlet my legs crashed. You remember the week of the floating torso? I’m not doing that again. Come on.”

Rimmer holds out his hand for Lister, and then seems to think better of it, turning the movement instead into swinging his arm up and scratching at the back of his head. He looks flustered and uncertain for a moment, and then he turns on his heel and marches imperiously out.

“Smeg, Rimmer, you make it seem effortless,” Lister mutters, but he follows behind him.

They make their way out into the street, where the rain is still pouring, and stumble through puddles in search of—well, Lister doesn’t really know what they’re looking for. They only picked up this particular game a few days ago on a salvage run, and he doesn’t know his way around the map or the options available.

After a few minutes, Lister spots a beautiful woman under a dark umbrella, her long skirt trailing in a puddle, and he crosses to her in impatience. “Excuse me?” he calls, and waves a hand to get her attention. “Excuse me—hey. Sorry, I don’t know your name—I’ve not actually played through the story yet. I’m Dave Lister, and this is Rimmer—Arnold.”

Rimmer looks over. His face is unreadable. After a beat, he looks back at the woman.

"Hey, doll." Her voice is a low, sensual drawl, American and laying it on thick, and her eyes travel up and down the length of Lister's body. "What can I do you for?"

“I’m gonna be honest with you here,” Lister says. “We’re just looking for a threesome.”

Rimmer makes a funny choking noise, and then starts coughing.

“Or, more specifically, he wants to get his end away, and I’d just like to be around for moral support. Don’t suppose you’d know who we could speak to if we wanted to get that kind of thing, would you?”

"Oh." The woman pauses thoughtfully. "Yeah, alright," she says, and the fake, corny accent is gone, replaced instead by a nasal whinge from somewhere near Harlow. "You wanna head back the way you came, then, past the old warehouse."

The directions that she gives them seem straightforward enough, and then she gives them a code to repeat at the door so that the staff know what they want, and so that in the real world, the computer knows what program to run. _There's a code for that?_ Rimmer had squeaked — but from the sounds of it, there must be a code for everything. 

It’s not far from there to the bar, just another couple hundred metres through the rain, and then it seems to rise out of the gritty dystopian mist. Called _The Cage and Candle_ , it stands slightly back from the pavement, a wide, squat building of pale wood, and warm yellow light spills from around the large square shutters.

Rimmer leads the way in, and then stands ineptly in the doorway for a minute, until Lister has to smack him to get a move on. They move together into a much busier, much more crowded bar, with decidedly seedier clientele. There are women in frothing lace cinched in by painful corsets who lean well over into the laps of distracted customers who seem more interested in the contents of the corset than the conversation. At card tables, middle-aged men scowl mistrustfully at one another, and Lister has to admit he’s tempted to get involved—but one thing at a time. He can do that whenever he likes, but if he cocks this up, he’s willing to bet money he’s never gonna get a do-over.

“Alright, Rimmer,” he says in a low voice, leaning in sideways. “Anything you like?”

“Lots. Lots and lots. Spoiled for choice, really. Difficult decision to make.”

“I’m not asking you to break the Enigma code, here. They’re all the same person, more or less. Different versions of the same simulations. You ever played The Sims 26 when you were younger?”

“No.”

Lister pulls a face. “Never mind, then.”

“Right.” Rimmer takes a deep breath, drawing himself up to full height, straightens his jacket, and sets off purposefully across the room towards a slender redhead in a straight white shift and furs. Her hair is pinned up, her lips painted, and she looks miles out of Rimmer’s league. She’s fit but not really Lister’s type—then again, he thinks, watching Rimmer drop into his lowest, weaseliest bow and _enchanté_ routine, at this point Lister’s not really in any position to lecture anyone on their good taste. Even from here, he can see Rimmer’s smarmy expression as he tries to grovel her into bed, and that is the point where Lister decides to intervene.

He spits in his hand, smooths it over his locs, and gets over to the pair of them just as Rimmer is three or four fabricated promotions into introducing himself.

Lister elbows his way in, his voice pitched as high and nasal as he can make it. “David Lister, Lord Emperor Admiral in Command at your service,” he wheedles, and doffs his hat. “Enchanté.” To Rimmer, he just gives a wink and a grin. “Alright, smeghead?”

Rimmer goes blotchy purple. “What are you doing, Lister?” he hisses.

“Cramping your style.”

“Well, stop it!”

“Not a chance.” Lister turns back to the woman. “What’s your name?”

“Jane,” she says, with a downwards flutter of the eyelashes that Lister guesses would be defined as _demure_ , and it would work, too, if he didn’t recognise the gesture as having been lifted frame by frame from _Age of Grace_. “Anyway, what are a couple of nice boys like you doing in a place like this?”

Lister’s grin turns wicked. “Hey, who said anything about nice?”

Rimmer says lamely, “I’m a nice boy.”

God, Lister can’t take him anywhere.

“As it happens, Jane, we’re interested in going—erm, off-narrative,” Rimmer says.

Lister looks at him. “Off-narrative?” he repeats in disbelief.

Rimmer shoots him a scowl. “I’m not saying it your way.”

“Of course, we can accommodate anything you want—but first I’ll need your help.”

“What?”

“In my spare time, I’m an artist,” Jane says, and her eyes glaze over as she settles into her normal dialogue options. “I have a dream that one day I’ll make it and be a real, famous artist. The sculpture that I’m working on—it’s almost finished, but I think someone is trying to sabotage me, trying to keep me down here forever. I don’t dare to leave to get the resources that I need to complete my masterpiece—but you could. Go to the Black Docks and bring me back fifteen loops of copper wire—”

“A side-quest?” Lister says incredulously, the situation finally registering in his head. “No way, we don’t have time for a smegging side-quest.”

Rimmer scoffs. “Copper wire? What on earth do you need that much copper wire for, anyway? What, are you making a telegraph pole?”

Lister slaps him on the shoulder. “Hey, steady on, Rimmer. Don’t go getting yourself worked up too early.”

Rimmer wrinkles his nose at him, his whole face taken over by contemptuous mockery— _oh, good one, very funny_.

Lister flips him two fingers and turns back to Jane, giving up. “Listen, spoke to a mate of yours—blondie under an umbrella. Told us to come here and cite—smeg, what was it?—42-quickhack-underscore-asterisk-131313.”

Jane blinks quickly, and then her entire head shudders in two rapid jerks, her face flickering at the edges like they’ve skipped through ten cutscenes in as many seconds, and then she returns to normal with a beatific smile as though the previous horrifying breakdown had never happened. “Of course,” she says, cool as a cucumber. “I see. So you’d like to have sex with me while your friend watches.”

Rimmer makes a strained noise that Lister doesn’t think he’s entirely conscious of. Lister glances at him with some concern before setting Jane right. “Nah, other way around. Believe it or not, he’s the one who wants to get off with you, if that’s alright.”

“Perfectly alright.”

Rimmer clears his throat, but when he speaks, his voice still shoots an octave high. “Are you sure?”

“Of course. We can begin now if you’d like.”

Rimmer glances helplessly between them, his throat working. “I mean—” he stammers. “I mean—yes, great. Perfect. Fine and dandy and whizz-bang wonderful—except, erm, I was just wondering—well. I’d like to have another drink first. So, if you’ll briefly excuse me—”

Without waiting for an answer, he wheels around and rushes back to the bar, almost knocking over a table in the process, and walking straight through two separate customers, who both look fairly disconcerted by the sensation of exploding into distended pixels before they reform in his wake. They shoot dirty looks at Rimmer over their shoulders, but he’s occupied, having reached the bar.

Rimmer leans over the bar, all long-limbed, gangly urgency. “Hey—over here,” he calls down to the bartender. “Double scotch, my good man. Did you hear me?”

Jane turns to Lister, her expression somewhere between a grimace and consternation. “Is your friend alright?”

“No, I said a double scotch!” Rimmer says, voice rising in volume and getting more agitated by the second. “With lemonade and grenadine—it’s not hard!”

The bartender asks, “And would you like the little umbrella with that, sir?”

“What am I, a wuss?” Rimmer snaps. “No, I don’t want a poxy umbrella, you dog-faced goit. Just the maraschino cherry on a cocktail stick.”

“Yeah, he’ll be fine,” Lister says cheerfully, watching with exasperation and, smeg alive, fondness, as Rimmer knocks back his ridiculously sugary drink and takes a moment to brace himself, his hands spread wide on the bar. His shoulders are a high, tense line, and Lister can’t see his face from here, but he’s willing to put money down that he knows the exact look of panic on it. “He gets like this sometimes. Don’t worry.”

Rimmer leans forwards and plants his forehead heavily on the bar top.

Lister goes on, “Give him a minute to have a mini-meltdown and he’ll be right as rain. Honest.”

Sure enough, Rimmer straightens up after a while, composes himself, and then turns around with the most terrifying and inane of smiles on his face.

“You ready, Arnold?” Lister asks, voice deliberately over-gentle, teasing.

“Shut up.”

Lister bites back a grin as they follow Jane through to the rooms upstairs. Just beside the bar, there is a carpeted staircase that edges two corners up to a mezzanine overlooking the floor below. Even from here, Lister can see three doors at the edge of the mezzanine, each with a different bird painted on the door. A swan and a bluejay are closed doors; the magpie is ajar.

Up ahead, Rimmer’s pace slows, and then he misjudges a step and nearly trips. He catches himself at the last moment, and then clears his throat. “Lister, a word?”

Lister lifts his head. “Yeah? What’s up?”

Rimmer stops halfway up the stairs, and half-turns back. “I was just thinking—”

“Bit dangerous, that.”

“—if we could perhaps… start slowly.”

Lister gives a half-laugh. “Tell her that, not me. I’m doing smeg all.”

“No, I mean. I don’t know if I can… get started,” Rimmer says delicately. He won’t meet Lister’s eyes. “With someone watching, that is.”

Lister’s eyes widen as understanding dawns on him. “Oh, what, you mean—” Without meaning to, his eyes flick down Rimmer’s body.

“Stop that,” Rimmer snaps.

“Sorry, sorry.” Lister holds his hands up in surrender, and then slaps one of them across his eyes. “Alright. Eyes closed, not paying attention until you’re at it, alright?” He spreads his fingers and peeks through the gap. “How’s that?”

Rimmer still doesn’t look pleased, a red flush rising on his throat, but he gives a curt nod, turns away, and continues the rest of the stairs at a brisk, militaristic march.

He gets into the magpie room and for some unfathomable reason, stands at attention while he waits for Lister to follow them in, stays rigid while Jane shuts the door, and even then doesn’t relax. The room is small, mostly filled by a double bed with a wooden headboard. In one corner, there is an armchair in coarse patterned fabric, a small circular side-table just beside it, on which sits a gas lantern running a low light. With the door closed, it is quiet, the room holding its breath.

Jane turns to them both. “So,” she starts conversationally, “how do you want to do this?” She reaches up to pull the pin from her hair, and auburn curls spill loosely over her shoulders.

Rimmer blinks at her. “Yes,” he says instantly. “I mean—however you want. Whatever—anything. Everything.”

Lister clears his throat. “I’m just gonna park myself down here,” he says, pointing to the armchair as he sidles over to his seat. “Don’t mind me.”

Jane smiles at Lister, and then redirects her attention to Rimmer, who still stands rigid like a malfunctioning wax-droid, and she goes to unbutton his coat. That seems to be all the prompt that Rimmer needs, stripping out of his coat so hurriedly that he gets his arm caught in the sleeve, hopping on one foot to struggle out of his shoes, and that’s when Lister decides that he can’t take it anymore. He shuts his eyes.

It’s probably for the best, this idea of Rimmer’s. Even with his eyes shut, Lister can hear a lot of inept scuffling, a weird panting noise, and what Lister is fairly certain is the sound of Rimmer tripping over something.

He shakes his head, eyes still closed, and tries to zone out. Rimmer’ll let him know when he’s ready, he’s sure. He just has to kill some time til then, and try not to kill the mood.

The room has become quiet, and even as Lister tries not to listen, he can hear the soft, wet noises of them kissing, nice and slow. Lister goes for a mental recital of old Rastabilly Skank lyrics, but it doesn’t quite drown out the hitch of breath, a soft sound of want. Fabric hitting the floor. Lister doesn’t mean to visualise it, but he’s putting his imagination to the audio that he’s getting, trying to figure out exactly how naked everyone is. The smooth slide of a tie being pulled through. The jingle of a belt-buckle. Shirt being untucked. 

Then there is a short, low noise, a half-moan—Lister doesn’t mean to open his eyes, but then he finds himself peeking. Underneath the furs, Jane is wearing some tiny silken thing, a loose white shape that hides exactly nothing, and smeg, she looks fantastic—and then Lister sees that she has her hand in front of Rimmer’s trousers, past the waistband of his underwear, and she’s touching him.

Rimmer’s head tips forwards, his forehead butting against hers; his mouth is open, distracted. His hands fumble, clumsy, to push the straps of her shift over her shoulders, and Lister can’t stop looking at him. The shift drops to her navel before she wiggles it lower, and Lister still has enough brain-power engaged to notice the pearly pink of her nipples, the soft curve under her breasts—but for some reason, he is more occupied with staring at the restless, shallow shift of Rimmer’s hips. Jane pulls her hand out to work open the zipper and fly, and Lister can see the shape of him through his trousers. Lister’s mouth is dry. He wants to see him.

Slowly, Jane undresses him—unbuttoning his shirt and peeling it from his shoulders, pushing his trousers down—and then Lister sees Rimmer’s underwear and he thinks, _for smeg’s sake_. Why is it that the AR can get the details as far as the long-line wool coat, the suspenders tight against his shoulders, and yet it gets this so wrong? Lister is embarrassed now on everybody’s behalf to be faced with the shapeless, white old-man boxers hiked high on Rimmer’s hips. Lister is just thinking that it’s the least sexy sight he’s ever laid eyes on when Rimmer’s shifts his weight a little from one socked foot to the other, and Lister’s train of thought derails, because he is abruptly aware of the thick line of Rimmer’s dick visible through the thin cotton, the bump of the head clearly outlined.

“Mm,” Jane says, a grin spreading across her face. She slips a fingertip into the waistband of Rimmer’s underpants, snaps the elastic against his waist. “These are nice.”

Rimmer squints at her. “Thanks.”

She slides her hand over his stomach to palm at his hip, and then she has her other hand at the small of his back to pull him in, and she kisses him. He’s slightly too tall, his head angling down to her, but he’s getting into it now, his hands on her waist. She pushes up the hem of his nicely starched undershirt, gets it up to his ribs before he takes over, yanking it roughly over his head, and then he stands bare-chested and wild-haired and red-faced, exactly how Lister likes him.

“Take a seat,” Jane says, gently, and Rimmer drops like he’s had his strings cut, which is interesting. Lister whacks a mental Post-It note on that, files it away for later. Rimmer is looking up at her like a rodent caught in headlights, also wearing the uncertainty of whether he’s about to be obliterated by whatever happens next, and when she finally gets the rest of his clothes off, sitting there naked, he briefly looks as though he would’ve preferred oblivion. Hands clasped nervously between his thighs, he shifts backwards in a few awkward bounces, and in Lister’s defence, he was trying not to stare at Rimmer’s dick, but a manoeuvre like that—he’s only human.

Every intelligent thought in Lister’s head vanishes. In general, Lister doesn’t have a lot of thoughts on cocks—he’s into guys, but he’s sensible enough to acknowledge that in the genitalia department, most men are a little weird-looking, and usually prefers curves, tits, softness—but, fuck, Rimmer has a nice dick. Hard, flushed dark at the head, the tip shining wetly, and when Jane traces her fingers along the length of him, Rimmer’s dick twitches, and Lister wants to touch him. He wants to taste him.

Jane crawls onto the bed, not quite in his lap, kneeling over him. She rubs her palm over the head of Rimmer’s dick and then wraps her hand around him, and he makes a low sound in the back of his throat. He gets his hand up to clutch at her elbow. His eyes flutter closed, and he is breathing fast. Meanwhile, Lister shifts in his seat, his own dick aching, trapped in his trousers. He wants to adjust himself, at least take a bit of the edge off, but he doesn’t trust himself. His hands tighten on the armrests, fingers gripping until his knuckles turn white.

Rimmer drops back to prop himself up on his elbows. Jane’s other hand roams over him, chest and arms and waist and stomach, nails dragging a slow path down his side, fingertips grazing over the peak of a nipple, so that Rimmer’s mouth falls open on a breathless sound. God, it’s been so long Lister can’t remember what that feels like, to touch someone and get that instant gratification, the immediate response that this feels good and you’re wanted. He thinks, then, that he’d swap ten years of drudging, hands-free ghost-fucking, ten good years of his life, if he could have just ten minutes with his mouth on Rimmer’s skin.

“Suck him off, will you?” Lister is startled to hear his own voice, barely recognises it—hoarse and wanting. Rimmer’s eyes snap up to meet Lister’s; Jane lifts her head.

Rimmer says, “Lister—”

Jane hesitates, looks between them.

“You’re alright,” Lister says, even though he can feel that his own face is hot. “You want her to stop?”

Rimmer’s chest is heaving; there is a pink flush up from his chest to his jaw. “No,” he says. His eyes don’t leave Lister’s.

Lister swallows. That’s not really what he means, and Rimmer knows it. _You want me to stop?_

Rimmer says, again, “No.” His tongue comes out to wet his lips. “Keep going.”

Jane wraps her fingers around Rimmer’s dick, jerks him slow and deliberate; Rimmer’s head tips back with a soft groan, but for a moment, his eyes are still on Lister. His hips rock, chasing her hand, and then as she leans down, over him, Lister loses his attention. Rimmer’s eyes close, but Lister is still staring, helpless, at Rimmer thrusting shallowly into her mouth, and he’s not thinking of her lips around his own dick, but of how Rimmer is holding back—how Rimmer clearly wants to be touched, how she’s not giving it to him. Rimmer wants more, wants to fuck roughly into someone’s mouth, wants heat and urgency. Lister knows how he wants it. Lister could do it right.

Rimmer makes a wordless noise, low and wanting, and his hands come up to thread through her hair, but for once in his smegging life he’s being polite, and he doesn’t ask for more. Lister watches his throat work, knows that he wants to.

Lister hears himself say it as though from outside his own body: “More—give him more.”

Rimmer’s eyes open. Flat on his back on the bed, he is left staring up at the ceiling, but his mouth is slackly open, and then Jane picks up the pace. Her hands slip from his hips, cup his bum and haul him forwards to change the angle, and then Rimmer moans—the noise seeming startled from his mouth.

She leans forwards, on her hands and knees, and the curve of her arse in the air is fucking gorgeous, but Lister is watching Rimmer. He’s watching Rimmer’s open mouth, the crease between his eyebrows, the way his chest heaves with every desperate breath, the way he fucks into her, slow and steady. Every noise he makes curls more tightly into Lister’s arousal, his dick pulsing painfully against his zipper. 

“More,” Lister says, and he can’t tell if he’s giving orders or begging. He can see sweat glistening in the line of Rimmer’s hip-bones, and God, he wants so badly to lick his skin clean. He wants to kiss every part of him, taste him, catalogue every sound he makes with Lister’s mouth on him. He wants Rimmer to fuck his mouth. “Yeah.”

Jane looks over. “Would you like to come here and show me how he likes it?”

Lister’s tongue is too big for his mouth. “What?” he says, intelligently. “No, I’m—I’m good. Don’t wanna—spoil it.”

“Please do,” Rimmer interrupts, and his voice cracks. “Spoil it, for God’s sake.”

Something about that break in Rimmer’s voice snaps the last vestige of Lister’s self-control. “Can I—” he manages, already fumbling with his button and fly.

“Yes, yes. Just tell her—”

“Will you ride him?” Lister cuts in, asking Jane, pushing his hand into his boxers. “Will you let him fuck you?”

Rimmer’s eyes widen, and Jane only says, “Yes,” and then she’s straddling him, a knee either side of his narrow hips. She trails her fingers along his jaw as she adjusts her weight, and Lister can just about glimpse Rimmer’s hand between her thighs before she slowly sinks down onto him. Lister gets his hand around his own dick, and at first, he is nearly winded by want, his breath crushed out of him, as Rimmer’s back arches, the long line of his body lifting, head tilting back to expose his throat, and the low noise that he makes has heat sparking along Lister’s spine. Rimmer exhales roughly, and he grabs helplessly at her hips as an anchor. Even from the corner, Lister can see his hands trembling.

For several long moments, Rimmer is motionless, and it looks as though it is all he can do to keep breathing.

“Alright?” he asks after a beat, and his voice is strained, stretched thin with restraint, and then, at Jane’s soft noise of affirmation, he rolls his hips up into her. 

The movement is unsteady, somewhat jerky, and Rimmer’s breath rushes out in one uneven burst with it, but then his fingers tighten on her hips. She moves with him, guided by his hands pulling her down as he rocks up, and Lister can’t see that well from here, but he can hear the slow, slick noise as Rimmer pushes inside her, and Lister is so hard it hurts. 

“Harder,” Lister says, without thinking, and he isn’t even sure who he’s talking to, but Rimmer’s hips snap up hard with a grunt that shouldn’t be even remotely sexy, but it has Lister’s dick throbbing in his hand. It’s everything he can do to slow down, and the effort is colossal when Rimmer does it again, punches a soft, breathy sound from Jane’s throat, and Rimmer is breathing ragged. 

Rimmer’s feet slide in his stupid smegging wool socks—Christ alive, why is he still wearing those?—as he tries to get purchase on the floorboards, and Lister can see his thighs shaking.

“Yeah,” Lister says, and he’s watching Rimmer’s fingers flex for a better grip on Jane’s hips, the way he pulls her down against him as he rocks deeper into her. “Yeah, that’s—good.”

A shaky noise rises in the back of Rimmer’s throat. His eyelashes flutter, mouth falling open. The muscles in his abdomen jump. Arousal curls so tight in Lister’s gut that there is no coherent thought in his head other than the battle between how badly he wants to fuck his fist and finish, against the searing need to see Rimmer come first.

Lister’s voice is a low rasp now, but for some reason he can’t shut up. “Come on, Rimmer,” he says, and watches Rimmer’s fingers dig into Jane as he fucks her, and then again, “Come on, like that”, and Rimmer is tipping his head back as though he can hardly breathe, his every inhalation a shallow, wordless sound. God, Lister would never say this out loud, not if he had all three million years of space-travel back in real-time, but Rimmer looks infuriatingly, unbearably gorgeous like this, long and lean, sturdy, solid, squirming on his back.

“Touch him,” Lister manages, half-gasped, as he shifts his weight in his seat to allow a better grip on himself. “Can you touch him for me?”

Jane looks back over her shoulder at him, her hair spilling between her shoulder-blades. “Where?”

Lister’s head is spinning, mouth dry. “I don’t know.” He can’t think, his brain scattered by the sounds Rimmer makes. He wants to get his mouth on Rimmer’s throat, the slope of his shoulder, the line of his clavicle. He wants to drag his teeth over the shallow rise of his chest, to learn the places that make him shiver, whether he likes bruises sucked into his stomach or the flat of a tongue over his nipple, whether he’s ticklish. “Everywhere.”

Jane’s fingers drag lightly down over Rimmer’s chest, through the fine hair at his sternum, over the shine of his skin where he sweats under her attention. She asks, “Like this?”

No—not like that. More, much more. Lister wants to know every inch of him, gliding his palms over Rimmer’s sides, lacing their fingers together to press Rimmer’s hands up over his head, blood beating beneath Lister’s fingers if he pins his wrists. He wants to know if Rimmer would let him, if he’d push back or lie pliant and eager. He wants to bite at the softness of his inner thigh, to kiss the thin skin of his hip-bone. He wants to kiss him. God, he wants to kiss him. Just one kiss, and have it be good. He wants to remember his mouth.

“More.” Lister doesn’t recognise his own voice. He sounds desperate. “More. Will you—will you kiss him? Please.”

Rimmer’s eyes close.

Jane leans forwards, but before she reaches him, he moves. One hand sliding to the back of her thigh, the other splayed between her shoulder-blades—and then Rimmer sits up, twists, and Lister wouldn’t ever give him the credit of saying it’s flawless and elegantly executed, but he gets the job done. It takes Lister totally by surprise, his hand stalling on his own dick, as Rimmer gets her onto her back with a groan of the mattress. She bounces slightly, reaches for him, and he’s between her thighs again in an instant, hooking her legs around his waist and pushing inside.

Then he kisses her.

Lister makes a sound he has never heard before, low and desperate, white heat tightening deep in his belly, and he jerks himself faster, almost frantic. Rimmer is all urgency, no finesse, fierce and sloppy and eager, teeth and tongue. He pulls back, presses his face into her throat as he fucks her, hard and purposeful, and Lister feels like he can’t breathe at the sight of it. The muscles of his shoulders knotting as he holds himself over her, the sweat glistening in the small of his back, his tiny arse and too-long gangly legs and his stupid smegging socks, and the way he surges forwards until the wooden headboard smacks the wall.

She gets a hand on his bicep, a hand at the back of his head, and for some surreal, incomprehensible reason, that’s when the jealousy gets Lister in a vice-like grip. He’s spent half an hour watching Rimmer get bossed around, sucked off, ridden into the mattress, all of it—and now, when Lister sees her fingers threading through the short curls at the nape of Rimmer’s neck, that’s when he is overcome by hot, blinding jealousy, thick enough in his throat that it makes his stomach turn. It’s been either six years or three million since Lister last touched him, depending on how you look at it, but Lister remembers fisting his hand into Rimmer’s hair like it was ten minutes ago, and he doesn’t think that’s something he should have to share.

He knows Rimmer better than anyone else—what winds him up, what makes him laugh, what he’s proud of and what scares him shitless—just like he knows now that Rimmer is desperately, painfully close. Rimmer trembles through his arms, elbows locked and wobbling, and when her hand tightens in a fistful of his hair, he moans, a filthy, reverberating sound, and the word in it is _Lister._

That’s all it takes. In an instant, Lister comes apart, toes curling in his boots, and he can hear the shuddering groan he makes as he finishes all over his hand and the front of his trousers. His hips jerk helplessly against nothing, chasing friction that isn’t there, and with his free hand Lister grips the armrest to steady himself.

On the bed, Rimmer’s pace stutters, his shoulders shaking, his hips snapping forwards in an inexact rhythm. Lister watches the way he clutches at her, breathing in gulps, but otherwise quiet—and then he thrusts once, twice, his hips jack-knifing, and he goes still.

In the minutes that follow, the silence is thick enough to slice. Everything seems impossibly loud—Rimmer’s breathing as it steadies and slows; Lister zipping up his trousers once he’s wiped his hand and tucked himself away; the bedsprings creaking beneath Rimmer’s knees as he climbs off Jane and sits back on his heels.

“Phew,” Lister says at last, just to break the quiet. “That was alright, ey?”

Rimmer rakes his hands backwards through his hair and says nothing. 

Jane shakes out her hair and retrieves the slip and furs from the floor at the foot of the bed. As she straightens her clothes, she turns to Lister and says, “What protocol would you like to engage now? Would you like to return to the narrative? If so, a cutscene entailing the South Street bandits’ attack on this establishment would begin almost immediately.”

“No, no, hold fire on that,” Lister says. “Give us a minute to recover, will you?”

Rimmer shifts to sit on the edge of the bed and he half-turns, a hand fumbling across the blanket. “Could you—”

Lister stands to retrieve Rimmer’s underwear and trousers, and tosses them at him. He doesn’t quite catch them, but they’re close enough that he can retrieve them with relative modesty, and then he starts getting dressed quietly.

Lister feels like he needs to say something to breach the silence, something to acknowledge what just happened, but he can’t find the words. _Hey, Rimmer, cheers very much for the show, I especially liked the part where you showed me exactly how you’d fuck me if only you weren’t dead. Also, if it seemed like I was pathetically in love with you, just ignore that, yeah? Because even if it’s true, you’re still mostly a knob and also, again, you’re dead._

Clearing his throat, Lister says, “You okay, Rimmer?”

Rimmer is pink-faced and not looking at Lister as he zips up his trousers and fumbles with the button. “Erm, yes, thank you,” he says.

That sounds like the usual cowardly lie that Lister would expect out of Rimmer, but before he can push the issue, Jane starts lagging strangely. She’s in the middle of putting her hair back up when the movement jerks and restarts, jerks and restarts. Everything else starts going a bit funny then as well, lights flickering, the decor and furniture jittering under Lister’s touch, and Jane is now not moving at all.

“For God’s sake,” Lister says, exasperated. “Rimmer, you’ve broken the smegging game.”

Rimmer blinks. “What?”

Lister gestures helplessly towards the frozen scene around them, and when he strains his ears, he can hear that downstairs the music in the bar has crashed, blasting one note in deafening staccato.

“This isn’t my fault,” Rimmer says feebly, and doesn’t even sound as if he believes himself.

Lister holds his hands up in surrender. “I mean, all I was doing was just sitting in a chair—”

Rimmer glowers at him. “You were _just_ sitting in a chair, in the same sort of way that Bill Clinton was _just_ making friends with his female staff.” He tucks his shirt back in, meticulously straightening his cuffs, and he watches Jane lag in the corner as he dresses. “It’s a shame. I wanted to say—something. Thank you, at the very least.”

“I know,” Lister says. “Well, you can always come back and play the game properly. Come and say hello, go on that telegraph wire quest, all the rest of it.”

Rimmer pulls a face, considering. “I did like the sound of that.”

“Maybe next time you could even try being a hero instead of leaving little old ladies to get mugged on street corners.”

Rimmer’s nose wrinkles, less pleased with that suggestion.

Lister smooths down the front of his coat and crosses to Rimmer. “Come on, then.”

“Mm,” Rimmer says unenthusiastically.

“Longer we stick around, the worse it gets,” Lister points out. “Technically, I’ve left a leg behind.” He directs Rimmer’s attention back to the armchair, where something has glitched and left his right leg still at the base of the chair, even though Lister can still feel that he has both legs firmly attached, and what’s more, is able to stand around here to prove it.

“I don’t want to go back yet,” Rimmer admits, his voice small.

“I know,” Lister says. “But we can always pop back, yeah?”

Rimmer makes a non-committal sort of grunt, not quite looking at Lister, arms folded in sullen reluctance. He looks dishevelled and warm and soft, still flushed, his clothes rumpled, shirt not buttoned all the way up. It’s probably because Lister just got off and he’s feeling good, kind of loose and affectionate, but Lister steps in closer.

He skims his thumb over the back of Rimmer’s wrist, along his forearm, then back along to the bump of his wrist-bone. It’s just that one point of contact, not chest-to-chest and pressed together through the length of their bodies, blindly grabbing and clinging—just one point, so that when there is a connection, it hurts like pins and needles, and not like being electrocuted. Lister stretches up onto his tippy-toes, feeling only a bit like a tit, and he gets right up close like he’s going to press a kiss to Rimmer’s mouth, but he doesn’t. He breathes shallow. He would get the corner of Rimmer’s mouth, if he pushed in to close the distance.

He can’t stay on his tiptoes that long—he’s out of shape and his calves hurt and he’s got nothing to lean on and steady him aside from this pinprick of fizzy discomfort against Rimmer’s arm. With a heavy sigh, Lister drops down onto the balls of his feet, but is surprised when Rimmer follows him down—and kisses him.

It is a dry, close-mouthed press against Lister’s lips, and it hurts a hell of a lot, an uncomfortable prickling, a tingle like sneezing through a mouthful of lemonade, but Lister holds on for as long as he can, until Rimmer pulls back. His brow is creased in the middle, his lower lip looking bruised so that it’s all Lister can do not to pull him back in — until Rimmer’s nose wrinkles and he makes a little retching sound.

“God,” he says, “that was more static than a racist joke on Radio 2.”

Lister huffs a laugh, shaking his head. “Shall we head back, then?”

Rimmer rubs a hand down over his face. “Oh, alright. After you.”

Lister claps twice and everything goes black.

After a moment, he opens his eyes back in the AR suite on _Red Dwarf._ He unbuckles the AR headset, and then instinctively, he glances across to where Rimmer should be. It’s jarring for a second, realising that Rimmer is nowhere to be seen, and then realisation sinks in at the sight of the tiny metal light-bee plugged into the AR computer’s hologram port. 

When Lister steps out of the AR booth, he suddenly becomes aware of the cold, wet, stickiness of his crotch, and he winces, holding himself stiffly. He’s willing to hold up his hands and admit to being pretty disgusting most of the time, but even by his standards, this is grim. He carefully sidles out of the booth, and goes to the AR computer.

The room is quiet—too quiet. Lister takes a deep breath to steel himself. Then he pulls out Rimmer’s light-bee, adjusts it slightly for external projection, and lets him go.

After a beat, Rimmer flickers into existence. Neat, trim, uniform immaculate, hair swept back into something mostly manageable, dead. He blinks in the light, adjusting, and then he looks at Lister.

“Well,” he says, and he smooths his hands over his jacket. 

Lister does an extended, exaggerated charade of dusting his hands off. “Right. Into the airlock you get, then. Rules are rules.”

“Hardy-har,” Rimmer says flatly, and Lister grins. He doesn’t know what he expected, but he supposes he thought that when they got back to the real world, out of AR, he wouldn’t look at Rimmer and feel like every cell in his body was aching for him, but hey-ho. He still wants to kiss him stupid. Still can’t. Same smeg, different setting.

***


	9. Blue Quilted

**IX**

The new mechanoid is approximately twenty feet tall, wider than the gap in Dwayne Dibley’s front teeth, and endowed with rippling metal muscles that elicit a very confusing mixture of emotions in Lister. The mech has a small blaster built into the wrist of his left hand, and programmed knowledge of every form of martial arts under the sun, and a taste for human blood—probably.

Last week’s derelict they found half-ripped open by asteroid-strikes didn’t have much else of value for them to salvage, aside from the mechanoid, which Kryten explains is a state-of-the-art security bot. “Originally, this may have served the purpose of some kind of bodyguard for the Infinity Fleet—but there hasn’t been any life on board for thousands of years.”

Lister says, “What do we need a massive bodyguard for?”

“Could be a bit of a laugh,” Holly says.

“Okay,” Rimmer says, clapping his hands together briskly. “Now, obviously there are arguments to be made that all of our lives have inherent value, and that we are all deserving of a bodyguard to protect us and enforce our will at all times, to which I say,” Rimmer hesitates a moment, considering. “Well—poppycock!”

“Rimmer, you’re already dead,” Lister says. “What good would a bodyguard do you now? Unless he can time-travel and teach you how not to cock up a drive-plate, he’s about as much use as a unicycle with a flat tire.”

“I’m not invincible!” Rimmer protests. “As tough and cool as I may seem, that doesn’t make me invulnerable. What about threats to the hologram projection room? Or my light-bee?”

“What would anyone want with your stinking light-bee?” Lister exclaims. “Unless they need the world’s most annoying suppository.”

Rimmer gives a haughty sniff, straightening his jacket. “Sneer all you like, Listy—everyone always does. No-one believes the threat against the great minds of history—Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, whatshisface, Hamlet’s uncle—always dismissed until they had a hole in the back of the head.”

“Do you promise?” the Cat says excitedly.

Kryten shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rimmer, sir, but I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” he says. “Even if we could reprogram the security bot, think of the risks of having a weaponised mechanical of that calibre aboard _Starbug_! What if it perceives the wrong thing to be a threat and before you know it, the damned thing is riddling Mr. Lister full of bullet-holes for not changing his socks!”

“Exactly!” Rimmer says.

“Mr. Rimmer, sir, it could kill him!”

“Exactly!”

“It could kill us all!”

“Exactly!”

Eventually, they come to the conclusion that it could be useful in a pinch. They don’t need to necessarily activate the bot any time soon, but it could be handy to have something a bit more powerful than their unwieldy, unreliable bazookoids to hand.

The Cat and Lister work together to haul it on board _Starbug_ while Kryten trails behind them, fretting and wringing his hands about the incumbent dangers, not to mention the audacity of adding another mechanoid to the ship’s roster without the approval of their existing mech, and Rimmer marches imperiously ahead like reigning emperor supreme.

Even with the promise that nothing will happen except in a real, urgent, one-hundred percent bona fide emergency, Lister is willing to bet both bollocks that one way or another, that mech will get booted up and reprogrammed to be Rimmer’s personal servant the second they take their eye off either of them.

Well, he’s not wrong. That’s how they end up running frantically away from a rampant homicidal droid intent on destroying everything that could feasibly harm Rimmer, including but not limited to: Lister, the Cat, Kryten, _Starbug’s_ hull, oxygen, water, and his own light-bee.

“Rimmer, will you power down your smegging death-bot?” Lister hisses, pressed back against a rocky outcropping to shield from the security droid’s horrifyingly precise gunfire.

“I can’t!” Rimmer shrieks from his own hiding place place in a low ditch. “He doesn’t like me very much.”

“Neither do we!” the Cat shouts back.

They’ve been unceremoniously driven from _Starbug_ and onto the surface of the desolate S3 planet they’d been investigating—and if the echoing rattle of gunfire from within is anything to go by, it’s not long until there’s no _Starbug_ left to return to. Already there is a dark puddle of fuel accumulating under one of the landing spokes, which is a recipe for disaster even before you add the smoke twisting from under the engines.

“We can’t hang round here much longer waiting for that thing to destroy the ship,” Lister says urgently. “If we lose _Starbug_ we’re done for.”

“One spark to the fuel line,” the Cat adds, “and we’re deader than platform soles.”

“Mr. Rimmer, sir, you’re the one who programmed it,” Kryten says. “There must be a way to deactivate it!”

“I don’t know,” Rimmer says frantically.

“How did you get it to recognise you as its charge to protect?”

“I don’t know!”

“Well, how did you turn it on?”

“Look, for simplicity’s sake, let’s just all assume I know nothing about anything,” Rimmer snaps.

“No change there, then,” the Cat says.

Then there is a monstrous plume of acrid black smoke that billows from the open gangway, and the security droid appears in the door, framed by smoke, blasters glowing red, eyes maniacal.

“Smeg,” Lister hisses, and drops down lower behind the outcropping.

“Send forth Arnold Rimmer,” the droid says, “and you will have nothing to fear from me.”

Lister jerks his head towards the droid. “Go on, then,” he says to Rimmer. “You heard him. Off you go.”

“Have you forgotten that it tried to destroy my light-bee for being a hostile, invasive parasite?” Rimmer hisses back.

“Rimmer, you are a hostile, invasive parasite.”

“If I go out there, he’ll kill me!”

“Not if you turn him off first!”

“I don’t know how to do that!”

The droid’s voice rises again over their squabbling. “If you will not volunteer Arnold Rimmer, I will have no choice but to recover him myself, and I claim no legal responsibility for damage, injury, or loss of life incurred as a result. You have been warned.”

“Don’t worry, sirs,” Kryten says. “That won’t invalidate my warranty. I’m insured against destruction by homicidal mechanoids.”

“I’m not!” Rimmer exclaims. “What am I supposed to do?”

The Cat shrugs. “Die?”

Rimmer barks a laugh. “And on that day, you’ll be shooting down pigs with an anti-aircraft gun.” Without a moment’s further delay, then, he scarpers, scrambling over the next ridge and vanishing.

“Rimmer!” Lister shouts after him, still not daring to stick his head too high above the parapet. “Get back here, you weasel—smeg!” He heaves a sigh. “Well, now what?”

He looks over to see Kryten and the Cat still looking at him expectantly.

The Cat huffs. “Are you gonna do something about your gibbering idiot?” he demands. “‘Cause the clock is ticking here, and I don’t just mean that I left my straighteners on.”

“Why is he my responsibility?” Lister complains. “He’s not _my_ gibbering idiot—he’s his own gibbering idiot.”

“I know, sir, I know,” Kryten says solemnly. “Caring about him is a burden I would wish on no-one. But he won’t listen to me and the Cat is fundamentally incapable of empathy, so—”

“Oh, alright,” Lister mutters, even before Kryten finishes his explanation, because okay, yeah, someone does need to sort out Rimmer before he cocks this up for all of them, and sure, it might as well be Lister, so what the smeg. He grabs the bazookoid off Kryten, the one with the grenade attachment, and goes off in search of the ship’s resident moron.

It doesn’t take him long; he just goes in search of the best hiding place, and sure enough, he tramps down the hill and finds a little cluster of rocks, in the middle of which is Rimmer. He is sitting on the ground, knees pulled up to his chest, arms looped around his ankles, and at least has the grace to look slightly embarrassed when Lister comes into view.

“Ah,” he says. “Listy. Hello.”

“Heya, big man,” Lister says, dropping into a crouch, and he braces an elbow against the rocks. “How’s it going down there?”

“Perfectly fine, thank you,” Rimmer says mildly.

“You wanna talk about what’s got you bricking it?”

Rimmer’s hands are laced together tightly enough that his knuckles jut whitely beneath his skin. “I’m not bricking it,” he says, because he’s a liar.

Lister tips his head over to one side. “Alright,” he says slowly. “So do you wanna talk about why you’re hiding in these rocks instead of facing the droid you set on us?”

Rimmer grumbles to himself. “No.”

“You wanna come out?”

“No.”

“Well, pick one, Rimmer, I’ve not got all bleeding day.”

“You have a bedside manner to put Florence Nightingale to shame,” Rimmer mutters.

Lister rolls his eyes. “Florence Nightingale didn’t have to put up with you in the Crimea. Come on, let’s move it.”

Rimmer hesitates, biting his lip. “Is there not an option where I can valiantly save the day by staying put?”

“Stop being useless and get up, Rimmer. I’ll look after you, but I can’t do it here.”

Grumbling all the way, Rimmer does at last climb to his feet and follow.

Five minutes later,the two of them approach the maniacal security droid with a hologrammatic remote projection device in Lister’s pocket and a flimsy plan in place. A lot flimsier than Lister let on when he pitched it to Rimmer, but Lister’s got a PhD in talking smeg, so he’s sure it’ll come off alright. Probably. Fifty-fifty.

As they waddle awkwardly back to _Starbug_ , Rimmer in the lead, Lister walking close behind him like he’s taken Rimmer hostage, the droid’s head snaps up, red eyes lock on, and blasters lift, already glowing hotter—and Lister ducks behind Rimmer.

“Don’t shoot!” Lister yells. “I’m bringing you Rimmer. I’ve captured him and brought him back for you. All yours. Just don’t shoot us or you might hit him.”

This whole hare-brained scheme hinges on the droid not twigging that Rimmer’s a hologram and shooting through him—but given that the droid has registered Rimmer’s light-bee as a weird mechanical parasite, Lister reckons they’re okay, as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid like fall through him.

“I’m gonna bring him over and you can destroy the parasite, then, yeah?” Lister says. “Nice and slowly and then he’s all yours.”

Rimmer, carefully positioned in front of Lister with his hands behind his back, is visibly trembling.

Lister lowers his mouth near to Rimmer’s ear. “If you pass out before we pull this off, I’m gonna flush you down the loo.”

“I’m not making any promises,” Rimmer mutters.

The security droid’s small beady eyes flash through yellow and orange, as though considering, and there is a faint whirring sound as of a lens being zoomed in. “My scan reveals that the parasite is still active,” the droid says. “It must be destroyed before it can harm Arnold Rimmer.”

“Yeah, yeah, all in good time,” Lister says as they shuffle nearer. His hand shifts nervously on the so-called parasite behind Rimmer’s back, held in a fist about level with where his light-bee would hover. “No worries on that front.”

“Hand him over,” the droid says, blaster raised and ready.

They’re close enough now. Lister says, “Think fast,” and he makes a motion as though to shove Rimmer forwards—but instead, throws the parasite clean through him, which, it turns out, is not Rimmer’s light-bee, but rather a primed bazookoid grenade.

Rimmer vanishes, his remote projection cutting out.

Lister drops to the ground, arms braced over his head. The droid reacts on instinct at a small hostile device being flung towards his face, and he shoots it.

The resulting explosion sprays Lister with oil, hot metal and disembodied droid limbs, searing the backs of Lister’s hands where he has his head ducked under his arm, and there is a harsh burning smell that might be coming from his locs. His ears are ringing, but otherwise there is silence.

Slowly, Lister uncurls, dusts himself off, and surveys the chaos before him. “Not bad,” he remarks to himself, straightening his jacket. “Not bad at all.”

“Nicely done, sir!” Kryten cheers, standing up with his arms lifted in triumph.

Lister doffs his cap in an exaggeratedly low bow, and then returns to the rocky outcropping where he carefully stashed Rimmer’s light-bee. He fiddles about with it, pressing a few buttons on the remote projection device still in his pocket, and then turns the light-bee on.

A small white light, a low hum, and Lister tosses it into the air, where Rimmer materialises a moment later, dishevelled, faintly annoyed, and blinking in the light. “Did it work?”

“Like a charm,” Lister says. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

Rimmer’s expression sours.

“Now, Mr. Rimmer sir,” Kryten starts, as he and the Cat make their way back to join Lister and Rimmer, “do you remember when I said, _let’s not set up this security droid because it’s dangerous, unpredictable, and could well—”_

“Oh, shut up.”

They head back to _Starbug_ to run diagnostics and make repairs, and Rimmer leans against the front landing spoke while Lister checks the bolts haven’t come loose, and Rimmer complains and talks smeg and makes Lister laugh until he shakes his head and calls him a doink—and it’s so frustrating, that Rimmer is all at once the twat who caused all these problems and also able to make it feel almost enjoyable.

Lister levers open a metal fuselage panel to fix the oil leak, and he’s just clumsily duct-taping things back together so that they’ll hold long enough for Kryten to get the welder set up—and while he is fumbling to scrape his thumbnail over the ridge of the tape-end, he glances over at Rimmer and his train of thought gets abruptly derailed.

Rimmer cranes his head up to scrutinise the data plaque on the inside of the panel, hands on narrow hips, a small frown creasing his forehead as he studies the specifications. As he reads, he lifts a hand to scratch absently at the back of his head, and although he habitually goes to flatten his hair afterwards, he misses the mark, and there are gravity-defiant curls that tuft up from the crown of his head.

He looks like such a colossal idiot and also like he’d be soft and warm to the touch if Lister could only reach out for him as he stands there quietly, and Lister is just looking at him like the most brainless guy in the known galaxies. Like the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is looking for new entries and Lister’s here auditioning for stupid hopeless lovesick gimboid: Lister-comma-David. But in Lister’s defence, Rimmer’s got his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and the big hands and narrow wrists and lean forearms are a brutal combination for a guy who’s not been touched in three million years, and Lister’s only human. And if he does also quite want to kiss the stupid frown off the world’s least charismatic man, then that’s his own business, because—

“What’re you staring at?” Rimmer asks. His eyes narrow as he eyes Lister with suspicion.

“Aw, nothing,” Lister says. “Just objectifying you, is all.”

Rimmer appears totally thrown by this, blinking rapidly like a rodent returning into the sun, and colour rises unevenly on his jaw. “What?” he splutters in protest. “No—I’m—well, don’t!”

Lister’s grin turns wicked. “Too late.”

Rimmer’s ears burn red to the tips, and he folds his arms across his chest. “Unbelievable,” he says. “I’m just a piece of meat to you, aren’t I?”

“Oh, yeah, big time.” Lister smirks. “Go on, say something sexy.”

Rimmer’s mouth opens and closes helplessly. “No. I—erm. I’m not sure that I—oh, piss off.”

“That’s it, Rimmer, talk dirty to me.”

“You blathering buffoon, just—shut up and fix the ship.”

“Oh, yeah, like that, hot stuff.”

Rimmer’s face is burning. “Will you stop?”

“Tell you what,” Lister says, turning to face him squarely. “You say something genuinely dirty and I’ll quit winding you up.”

“Will you actually, or will you actually carry on being annoying?” Rimmer says, disbelieving.

With a grin, Lister holds up a hand in a lazy approximation of a Boy Scout salute. “I swear one hundred percent that I promise I will stop winding you up if you say something filthy.”

Rimmer clears his throat. “Lister, I—” he starts dramatically, taking this further than Lister expected and with extra gravitas. “I, erm. Well, I think you’ve got a marvellous cock.”

Lister gasps, scandalised. “Rimmer, this is a professional working environment,” he scolds. “That’s a totally inappropriate thing to say to a colleague.”

For a moment, Rimmer seems mortified, head ducked into his chest, but then he gathers himself. “Fine thing to say to a smeghead, though.”

The laugh it gets out of Lister takes them both by surprise, and Rimmer’s pleased, embarrassed smile gets Lister right in the warm and fuzzies, and then the Cat sticks his head through the door of _Starbug_ overhead.

“You two bozos nearly finished?” he calls. “I’ve seen roadkill decompose faster than you two move. Let’s go!”

Lister jerks his head towards the door. “Go on, sex bomb, see if they need any help in there.”

“I’m helping out here,” Rimmer protests.

“Are not. You’re a distraction, is what you are. Now smeg off—I’ll be done in a minute.”

With a huff, Rimmer slopes back off into _Starbug_ and Lister gets on with repairing the fuel line. As he rips off a section of duct-tape with his teeth, he glances back at Rimmer climbing up the gangway and he wrestles back a smile.

“Hey!” A disgruntled voice startles Lister out of his reverie, and he looks up to see the Cat still sticking his head out of the ship above, frowning down at him. “Less smirking, more working!”

Lister rolls his eyes and gets back to it.

***

“My name,” he says, “is Legion.”

It’s a fancy name, Lister, thinks, for someone who looks like half a roast turkey still in cling-film, but he has to admit it has a certain gravitas about it. What’s more, it knows who they are, and how best to help them with whatever they respectively need - Lister’s appendix, Kryten’s programming, and… Rimmer.

At first, it had been horror that rose in Lister’s gut, watching this total stranger, the Jolly Green Giant, yank out reams of Rimmer’s inner workings to upgrade his light-bee without so much as buying him a drink first—and then Rimmer flickers back, looking incredibly affronted, and also like he’s had a high-speed backstage costume change. Rimmer is bristling, cross, ready to draw himself up to full, nostril-flaring height, and start a maximum intensity scold, and—he has a body.

It happens without thinking. Lister stretches a hand across to knock his knuckles hesitantly against Rimmer’s hip, and—oh—smeg—that’s—that’s—

Slow realisation dawns on Rimmer’s face, his expression lighting up. He reaches out, fumbling, for Lister. It’s clumsy, fingers unsteady as he finds Lister’s shoulder, but they make contact. Rimmer touches him.

There is the slippery fabric of Rimmer’s jacket, the solidity of him underneath, but there isn’t time to fully dwell on it because a weird green man is leading them still deeper into the belly of the station, and Lister feels he should focus his attention on working out whether this guy is alright or another alien nutter. Easier said than done, though, when every few steps Rimmer is getting distracted, stopping to trail his fingertips over a seam in the metal wall panels, or rub his thumb over a scrap of fabric, to press reverently on a glass pane; for the first time, he rushes to open a door for the novelty of it.

“Looks like chivalry _is_ dead,” Rimmer says, giddy, and steps back to let the Cat and Kryten through.

Lister shakes his head. “Yeah, you’re a real knight in shining armour.”

To tell the truth, everything is a bit of a jumble over the next twenty-four hours—turns out that Legion is a nutter after all, albeit a very nice one. He’s so diligent in taking care of their every need that it takes Lister an embarrassingly long time time to twig that Legion’s locked the door behind him. It’s a cell—a nice one, with rows and rows of cheesy rom-coms galore, but a cell all the same.

Lister tries the door, tries slamming his shoulder against it until his whole arm aches, tries smashing the fire alarm, prying free a bed slat to use as a crowbar but only gives himself a splinter. He bangs on the far wall and tries to call through it.

“Hello?” he shouts. “Can anyone hear me? Rimmer? Cat? Kryten?”

Lister presses his ear expectantly against the wall, but not so much as a whisper comes back. He turns, presses his back against the wall and slowly slides down it to sit on the floor. He wonders what Rimmer’s paradise prison cell looks like—revision material, probably; a Napoleon theme, bedsheets so aggressively starched that they could stand up on their own.

Lister lifts his head and looks up to see a new addition to the Cell of Dreams: alongside the twelve-pack of lager and video game console, there is a framed smegging photograph of Rimmer, in which he stands with his arms crossed, not quite smiling, looking haughty and faintly disapproving and so handsome that it winds Lister right up.

Loudly, he says, “Oh, piss off,” and the photo vanishes just as easily.

Lister drops his head back against the wall with a hollow thump, and he resigns himself to an agonising evening of peace and quiet until tomorrow comes.

In the morning, they escape, so all in all, it’s not one of their most taxing hostage ordeals—it barely makes for a two on Lister’s self-devised Abduction Scale—although the damage they wreak with their cobbled together star-drive certainly causes a sizable dent in their week. One minute they’re all happily willing their way to success with the belief in their combined intelligence, a split-second from holding hands and singing _Kumabaya_ , and the next they’re perilously close to having their insides sucked outside by the vacuum of space.

A hole the size of a small sandwich is punched through the airlock door, venting oxygen at a rate that almost instantly gets all kinds of alarms blaring. Lister’s ears pop painfully as he goes tumbling arse over tit out of control, and as he and the others scrabble for purchase, Kryten shouts, “We need to fill that gap so the ship can repressurise before your heads burst, sirs!”

“Good plan!” Lister shouts back.

“Kryten,” Rimmer yells, “if you let go, we can use your body to block the vent until _Starbug_ ’s pressure equalises!”

Lister flails a hand uselessly towards Kryten to try and stop him. “Kryten, no!”

“Mr. Rimmer is right, sir,” Kryten urges. “I’m not human, and so I won’t be harmed. It’s the best solution for our predicament. Watch—” And with that, Kryten lets go, is dragged across the ship’s midsection by the venting airlock, and his body is sealed against the hole with a funny, drawn-out farting noise. 

After a moment, the alarms cut out as the pressure settles, and aside from the faint hissing noise of the hole on the other side of the airlock, things go more or less back to normal—papers that swirled around the room now drift slowly to the ground; the red light pulsing across the ceiling switches off and the ordinary white fluorescent strip-lighting comes back on. Lister hurries across to Kryten and quickly keys in his clearance code to enable a temporary fix.

The hissing sound stops. Kryten gives a sigh of relief.

“You okay, Krytes?” Lister asks, and he grabs one of Kryten’s hand to pull him from the wall—but he doesn’t move.

“I’m perfectly fine, thank you,” Kryten says pleasantly. “Unfortunately, however, I think I am still sealed to the wall.”

“Smeg,” Lister says, which he thinks sums it all up. “Cat, will you give us a hand?”

Together, he and the Cat grab an arm each and heave at him— _one, two, three_ _—no, pull ON three, alright? One, two—for smeg’s sake, Cat—_ until, with a loud pop, the seal breaks and they all go staggering forwards.

“Thank you, sirs,” Kryten says, rubbing at the joint of his neck and shoulder.

Behind them, Rimmer lets his breath out in a huff. He straightens up, dusting off his hands. “I can’t believe you actually agreed with my plan,” he says, pleased.

Lister shakes his head. “I can’t believe it more or less worked. First time for everything, I suppose.”

“Yeah—not bad, Helipad-Head,” the Cat says, and pats Rimmer on the shoulder—not forcefully, but Rimmer flinches bodily at the impact. He blinks, startled—and then he looks over at Lister.

Of course—with everything else that has been happening, it got kind of pushed to the back of Lister’s list of priorities that Rimmer has a body now. He can touch; he can feel. Lister says nothing, but he accidentally looks Rimmer up and down without meaning to, his eyes skimming over chest, hands, hips, thighs, and Rimmer stands there frozen.

Kryten’s voice comes floating from behind them. “Mr. Lister, could you bring the toolbox down here, please?”

Lister jerks back into reality. He heads for the cockpit—squeezing past Rimmer, who stands just in front of the doorway, and carefully not looking at him, feeling his stare on the back of his head—to retrieve the toolbox. When he turns back, Rimmer has gone, smeg only knows where, but Lister doesn’t think about it. Instead, he helps Kryten to repair the airlock door, rearranging wires and banging rivets back into alignment, and in general, doing everything humanly possible so he doesn’t have to think about touching Rimmer. Smeg.

His hand slips where he is jamming a screwdriver into the side of the airlock pressure-valve, and he smacks his hand on the metal hard enough that it jolts all the way from his pinky up to his elbow. “Smeg,” he mutters, and hastily needs to shove the screwdriver back in before it messes up what Kryten is working on, but the damage has been done—it’s in his head now. Rimmer’s hands and his mouth, Rimmer’s hips and his narrow thighs, Rimmer’s throat and his jaw and his chest, his—

“Is everything alright, Mr. Lister, sir?” Kryten asks.

“Yeah, super.” Lister adjusts his grip on the screwdriver. “Just… slipped.”

“If it’s a two-hand job, I could ask Mr. Rimmer to—”

“No,” Lister bursts out, maybe just slightly too forcefully. The thought of having to crouch here next to Rimmer, pressed against his side, and just sitting still and not talking about it and not doing anything about it and perhaps also making small-talk with Kryten… Lister thinks he might have a nervous breakdown. “No—you’re alright. I’ve got it.”

In theory, Lister knows that everyone else already knows—Kryten and the Cat, that is. It’s been six years and they’re not exactly subtle, as the Cat once pointed out. Therefore, there should be no problem with him grabbing Rimmer by the clothes and hauling him upstairs and locking the door for forty-eight hours, except for the problem that Lister doesn’t think he can do it. There’s a weird degree of presumptuousness to it, although they’ve been kind of pretending to shag for longer than most pop singer’s careers, but maybe that’s because there was nothing better to do. Not having a body meant Rimmer didn’t really have a lot of prospects for anything—hobbies, relationships, none of it. Maybe now that he has hands he’ll find something better to do with them, like playing chess, or painting little figurines of fascist dictators.

Lister wants to throw himself into the engine.

Once everything is repaired—at least to the point where they can walk away from things without worrying that the ship will implode—it’s Lister’s turn at the helm, and there’s some relief in that. Several hours where Lister can just be totally on his Jones, where he can sit quietly and eat crisps and play Minesweeper instead of thinking about Rimmer.

Luckily for him, there’s little in the realm of interruptions to this perfect scheme. Deep space is pretty empty ninety-nine percent of the time, and while there is a solar system a few light-years ahead of them, they won’t get to it anytime soon. Normally, he’d be craving something different, desperate for anything more interesting than the void stretching endlessly ahead—and let’s be honest, the bar for _interesting_ is set abysmally low—but he leans into the boring mundanity like a comfy old armchair.

Distantly, he can hear Kryten pottering about, the sounds of him cleaning and tidying enough to make Lister vaguely wonder if there’s anything he’s left out in the mid-section which will mysteriously vanish. He’s forever losing things only to find that Kryten has created new ‘safe places’ for things to be neatly stowed away—boots in a wall panel that Lister didn’t even know existed; his spare jacket hung on a retractable peg alongside the galley fridge; all his magazines stashed away into a cardboard box labelled _GRANULATED SUGAR_ and tucked into a slim slot under the stasis beds. It used to drive Rimmer mental as well; he’d be halfway through a game of checkers with one of the skutters when Kryten would come along, wipe all the pieces individually, and then set them back in completely the wrong places.

Then again, it was never exactly difficult to drive Rimmer mental. There was a time, back when everyone was still alive, when they still worked Z-shift together and wanted to kill each other, when Lister had got it perfected to an art form, could drive him ballistic to the point of a screaming row with nothing more than a well-timed raspberry. That kind of thing wouldn’t work nowadays, though. For all his flaws—all his many, myriad flaws—Rimmer has changed a lot in death, become better… or at the very least, less overtly terrible.

Lister only becomes aware of just how far down the rabbit-hole he’s fallen when he is jerked back to reality by Kryten’s voice.

“Coffee round!” Kryten calls from the main body of the ship, and Lister blinks back into the present.

Out of the windscreen, nothing has changed, really. A slightly different bit of space; a slightly different view of the black vacuum. Lister flips on _Starbug’_ s front headlights just in case that makes a difference. It doesn’t. He, flicks on autopilot instead, pushes his chair back, and goes down into the mid-section. Down in the main belly of the ship, Kryten is carefully balancing a floral plastic tray on which three mugs are set out.

“Ta-da!” Kryten says excitedly, setting them down on a crate with a dramatic, revelatory gesture, as Rimmer and the Cat make their way down from the sleeping quarters. “Look—three mugs! For you as well, Mr. Rimmer! You can drink coffee now!”

“Oh,” Rimmer says, stepping in closer. “Yes, of course. Thank you.”

Rimmer and Lister accidentally go for the same mug, and their fingers bump on the handle. Rimmer jerks his hand back like he’s been scalded, and Lister hasn’t quite got a proper grip on the mug yet, so he half-drops it back onto the tray, slopping hot coffee over the rim.

“Oh, be careful, sirs!” Kryten exclaims. “It’s hot!”

Lister pulls his hand back into his own space, and he looks at Rimmer. “You can have that one, if you want.”

Rimmer’s throat works. His own hand is pressed flat against his ribs, as though he’s having a heart attack, or at least thinking about faking one so that he doesn’t have to have his conversation, which sounds about par for the course. “I—” he says, and gets no further.

“They’re all the same,” Kryten says cheerfully. “Four sugars, no milk. I wasn’t sure how you would like to drink your coffee, Mr. Rimmer, but I assumed that it might be something similar to the way that Mr. Lister has his. Is that correct?”

It seems to take Rimmer a long moment to realise that Kryten is speaking to him, and after a beat, he looks at him and says, “What?”

“Your coffee,” Kryten repeats. “Four sugars, no milk. Or would you like me to make it differently?”

“I don’t know,” Rimmer says eventually, and his forehead creases into a frown. “I don’t remember how I—”

“Milk, one sugar,” Lister says, and Rimmer looks at him and Lister’s mouth is coming up dry. “That’s how you took your coffee when you were alive.”

Rimmer swallows.

The Cat leans surreptitiously in between the two of them. “I’m gonna have this one,” he announces, and takes the mug that Rimmer and Lister had both just been fighting over, and then slowly slips away backwards to drink it. After a moment, Rimmer looks back down at the tray, the gears in his head almost audibly turning, as though bewildered to see that one had vanished.

“Sir?” Kryten prompts. “Would you like me to make a different one?”

“No,” Rimmer says, at last. “No, I’m not thirsty.” He turns and walks away, in the direction of the engine rooms—and trips over a loose cable on the way out.

Kryten’s face falls.

“Don’t worry, Krytes,” Lister says comfortingly, reaching out for the tray. “I’ll have both.”

***

Here’s the thing: Arnold Rimmer is still a coward.

Magically acquiring a body did not magically endow him with a backbone as well. If anything, it seems to have sucked out what little spine he did have and leave him with all the moral fibre of a chicken fillet. It was almost easier when they couldn’t touch—at least then they were resigned to it, as opposed to this expectant anticipation that now something needs to happen between them. 

If anything, now that they can actually touch, Rimmer seems to be actively avoiding being alone in a room with Lister, which is a massive blow to Lister’s self-esteem but what the smeg, he’s resilient. So he doesn’t let it get to him too much when he walks into a room and Rimmer squeaks and finds a reason to scuttle somewhere else— _think I’ve left the kettle on_ , or, _just remembered I haven’t combed my hair today,_ or, _simply must get round to cataloguing our toilet paper inventory_ —and then he’s gone, in a weaselly flash, to hide in a cupboard somewhere.

You would think that, upon acquiring a real, physical body, Rimmer’s first order of business would be getting off, but if anything, he’s unusually schtum on the topic. No mention of girls, no jokes about Rachel or Inflatable Ingrid, just Rimmer stalking around the ship radiating palpable tension like a small, stressed-out uranium mine. It’s pathetic, and it’s driving Lister mental, because he’s fairly certain he bagsied the right to shag Rimmer at the earliest opportunity about three million years ago, and he’s got absolutely nowhere with it. What is the point of being stupidly in love with your bunk-mate if he won’t even let you wank him off? Honestly.

Back at the helm, Lister checks their course bearing. It doesn’t need much adjusting, as there’s not much around them for a couple of light-years, but he fires up the long-range scanner anyway, just to check.

It’s an uneventful shift, to say the least. Lister moves on from Minesweeper to Solitaire and does not beat his high score; he finds a pimple on his neck that, at first tentative squeeze, feels juicy, but actually just hurts a lot. He contemplates what he’ll have for tea—usually curry, he’ll admit, but he’s tempted by the thought of a cheeky kebab. He plaits three of his locs, finds something crusty on the end of one in the process, and spends some time digging out what ends up being a dried cornflake. When _Starbug_ drops out of its present flight heading, very little has changed. It’s like playing Spot the Difference with a blindfold on. There’s something coming up on the scanner—lone floater, maybe debris, or another ship—but it’s too far away to tell and it’ll be well past the end of Lister’s shift by the time it’s near enough to find out.

Into the third hour comes the Cat, digging around looking for his cuticle oil.

“My nail beds are a wreck,” he complains bitterly as he ransacks the cockpit. “I got a hangnail you could use to hang-glide.”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Lister says, watching the Cat turf aside Rimmer’s notebook, Lister’s old napkins, and all other assorted crap—it’s more interesting than what’s out the window, at any rate.

“I’d say it's an all-hands-on-deck situation, but on second thoughts, no way! I know where your hands are going—and buddy, you’re gonna need ‘em!”

Lister frowns. “What, for a kebab?”

The Cat straightens up, aghast. “Please tell me you’re gonna put Admiral Brillopad out of his misery.”

“Wait—what?”

“Because this is unbearable,” the Cat says. “Just go put a sock on the door handle and be done with it, _please_.”

“What?” Lister protests. “Look, it’s not—okay, it is like that, but—”

“Because I’ve seen bullets that looked more appetising than any more of this pathetic _staring_ and _talking—_ ”

“Look, it’s—it’s fine. We don’t—I mean—just, I promise, it’s fine, alright?”

As if on cue, everything gets much worse, because Rimmer comes in. He walks through the doorway looking about as relaxed as a heavily pregnant heifer in the middle of a rectal examination—Jesus, he’s actually _sweating_ —and says, “Lister, can I have a word?” Then he spots the Cat, and his entire body kind of malfunctions. He touches the wall, jerks as if he’s been electrocuted, stumbles half a step backwards, half-moves as though to sit down and then thinks better of it, hovering in the middle of the aisle in an awkwardly stooped position. “Actually, no—just realised—aha! There it is.” He lunges across the cockpit to grab a bog-standard black biro, which he then flourishes triumphantly overhead. “Yes! Been looking for this—now I can—yep. Thank you. Well, that’s all.”

And then he walks out.

There is a long silence between Lister and the Cat.

At last, Lister says, “Okay, I take your point.”

“I’ll even take your shift,” the Cat says. “Just—go.”

Lister is surprised. “Oh—cheers, guy.”

“I’m not doing it for you, I’m doing it for me. I can’t take any more of it.”

Lister shrugs. The end result is the same, so he’s not too fussed about the Cat’s motives. He climbs out of his seat and heads down into the body of _Starbug_. There’s no sign of Rimmer there, but Lister has a suspicion that he’ll have gone to hide in their sleeping quarters, so he makes his way up the stairs.

At the top of the steps, Lister pauses for a moment before he reaches the open doorway—he rubs a hand over his face, smooths his hair down, wipes his sweaty palms on the front of his boiler-suit. Taking a deep breath, he heads in.

Totally oblivious, Rimmer is pacing up and down, his hands twisting and wringing like he’s trying to rip his own fingers off. His manic energy is off the charts, beyond the realm of leg-jiggling and out the other side, his hair sticking up on one side where he must have tried to style it—or tried to pull it all out during an anxiety attack, one or the other. With Rimmer, there’s not much difference.

Lister touches the panel to shut the door behind him, and the soft click of the metal sliding into place is what finally alerts Rimmer to Lister’s presence. He whips around, eyes wide, and freezes.

Neither of them speak.

Lister can feel his heart against his ribs like it’s drumming for an Olympic opening ceremony. His stomach is in knots to the point of nausea. He feels adrift, like he doesn’t know where to put his hands. Rimmer looks pretty much how he feels. He is white-faced—whiter than usual, that is—and tense and his throat works for a moment while he stands there in helpless silence.

Rimmer swallows. “My pen exploded in my hand,” he says idiotically. His voice is faint. “I had to find a new one.”

Lister says, “Shut up, Rimmer,” and he moves in towards him.

Rimmer moves first, crosses the space between them in quick, jerky steps, takes Lister’s face in both hands and kisses him.

His thumbs are spanning Lister’s cheeks and tilting his face up as he presses in closer, and Lister gets one hand in the back of Rimmer’s hair, the other curling around the nape of his neck, and he holds on tight. Lister holds him as close as possible, and his heart is going so fast that he feels a little light-headed, because here is Rimmer, warm and solid and tall and lean and shaky and real. Big ears, silly hair, long legs, the lot of it. He’s here and he’s real, and it clenches hotly inside Lister in a way that usually means he needs to chug a box of indigestion tablets, except it’s all down to Rimmer and his shaky hands cradling Lister’s jaw like he’s made of glass.

Rimmer takes an unsteady, open-mouthed breath against Lister’s mouth, dragging in air that he doesn’t even need, and he kisses Lister again. He kisses him and he kisses him, again and again, clumsy, close-mouthed, desperate, like he doesn’t know how to stop, and neither of them are pulling apart to take this any further, but Lister doesn’t want to let go in case Rimmer disappears. In case this isn’t permanent and something goes wrong, something happens and Rimmer goes soft-light again with no way back to a body, back to being with Lister.

There is a steady, rocket-roar of blood under Lister’s fingers, but he can’t tell if it’s his pulse or Rimmer’s, his own heart going for broke. He breathes in an unsteady gulp, and then he kisses Rimmer again, threads his fingers through the curls at the nape of Rimmer’s neck and he presses up onto tiptoes to get closer, until they’re chest-to-chest and Lister can feel him everywhere. He’s here, he’s real. He’s real.

Slowly, Rimmer’s hands drag down Lister’s jaw, skim down the sides of his neck, over his shoulders, to clutch at the front of Lister’s leather jacket with shaking hands. He pulls away far enough to breathe, his nose rubbing alongside Lister’s, and their foreheads bump. Lister can feel the H against his skin. 

He drops down from tiptoes but doesn’t back off. He doesn’t give Rimmer an inch of space; he holds on.

Rimmer is breathing ragged, open-mouthed and trembling. His eyes are still closed, so tightly that his brow crumples in the middle. He looks like he might be fighting off a panic attack, or in the middle of one. His fists, clenched into Lister’s jacket, are curled tight enough that his knuckles have gone white.

“Hey, Rimmer,” Lister says gently. His fingers twist through Rimmer’s hair, his thumb stroking a slow, comforting pattern behind his ear. “Rimmer? You alright?”

The only response for a moment is a loose, somewhat frantic nod, like a bobble-head doll on a rollercoaster, and then after a beat, Rimmer says, “Yes, fine. Splendid.” His voice is a dry rasp. “Splendid.”

“Yeah?” Lister runs one hand down between Rimmer’s shoulder-blades. “Because it does look a bit like you’re trying out for the lead role in a Pepto-Bismol campaign.”

Rimmer opens his eyes. He doesn’t look at Lister, but he doesn’t need to for Lister to see that his eyes are red. “It’s not outside the realms of possibility,” he admits.

“That’s alright, I don’t mind you dropping your lunch down your trousers.” Lister’s hand slides around to Rimmer’s collarbone, to graze down over his chest, and so sue him, he can’t stop touching him. “As long as you keep kissing me, that’s fine by me.”

Rimmer’s nose wrinkles. “That’s—revolting.” He lets go of Lister, although he doesn’t move away to give them any space, and he wipes roughly at his eyes with his fingertips. “I’m not crying, by the way,” he adds. He definitely is. “I’ve just got—”

“Something in your eye?” Listers suggests kindly. “You want me to get you some brass band music?”

“No, thank you.”

Lister tuts. “Come here,” he says, and he gets his arms round Rimmer properly, even with Rimmer’s hands trapped between their chests; he just folds him into a hug and holds on. He hooks his chin over Rimmer’s shoulder and settles a hand on the back of Rimmer’s head. Together, they stand there, Rimmer with his face pressed into Lister’s hair, unsteady but still breathing. Slowly, the shaking lessens, although it doesn’t quite stop altogether, but Lister doesn’t let him go. He is still tracing slow circles through Rimmer’s hair. “Breathe.”

Muffled against the top of Lister’s head, Rimmer says, “I am breathing.”

In the past, in his spiteful moments, Rimmer has occasionally accused Lister of having no idea what it’s like to not be real, to be untethered from everything, and Lister won’t pretend he knows what Rimmer’s feeling now that he’s got a body, but as for himself, it’s like coming into harbour after years adrift—complete with seasickness and everything. It’s overwhelming, all-consuming, and Lister isn’t even dead. He hasn’t even been a ghost for the past six years like Rimmer has.

“You’re okay,” Lister says. “Just breathe.”

“Shut _up_ , I am breathing.”

Lister uses the hand on the back of Rimmer’s head to lightly smack him. “You’re hyperventilating, there’s a difference.”

Rimmer takes a deep, slow breath. His hands are still pinned between their bodies. “Have you been using salt and vinegar crisp dust as cologne again?”

“It’s called Eau de McCoy’s, actually.”

Rimmer huffs a sound that might be a laugh. He lifts his head and rubs at his eyes again, and Lister uses the hand threaded through the back of his hair to pull him gently down and kiss him. Rimmer makes a soft, breathless sound against Lister’s lips, and his mouth is less shaky now but still ungainly, awkward, distracted like he’s being pulled in fifteen different directions and doesn’t know where to focus his attention. Distantly, Lister is aware of Rimmer half-hard against Lister’s thigh, but Lister reckons it’s just over-stimulation; Rimmer’s so jittery with nerves that Lister is pretty certain he’d kill him all over again if he so much as slipped him some tongue.

Lister draws back, his hands shifting to Rimmer’s shoulders, and he holds him not quite at arms’-length to look at him. “Alright?”

Rimmer takes a deep breath through his nose, chest inflating. “Better,” he says, and he sounds slightly embarrassed by it. “So—thank you.”

“No trouble, man.”

After a beat, Rimmer visibly pulls himself together, drawing himself up taller and pushing a hand through his hair. He straightens the front of his jacket—his new, blue, hard-light jacket—and Lister gets just a touch distracted by it, his hands sliding down over the fabric, because the fabric is definitely what’s catching his interest there, and nothing to do with the body underneath which is newly solid and warm and broader than it was the last time Lister got to touch it.

“The blue’s not bad,” Lister says, off-hand.

Rimmer glances down, nonplussed, as though he’s forgotten. “Oh—yes.” His eyes flick up to Lister’s, and the expression there is still precarious, hesitant and anxious and wanting. “I wasn’t expecting a wardrobe change, I admit.”

Lister pulls a face. “Lot of things we weren’t expecting,” he says, and he tugs on the front of Rimmer’s jacket, “but it’s good. Come on, then. We’ve got things to do, you and me.”

Rimmer frowns. “What things?”

“Gotta organise your clothes for one thing,” Lister says. “I distinctly remember something about a full wardrobe revamp as soon as you get your body back—andas somebody once mentioned, I’m a bit of a slob but I keep my word.”

Rimmer’s face lights up.

“Then—I mean, afterwards,” he says hopefully, wetting his lips, “can I—could we—get some mashed potatoes?”

Lister huffs a laugh. “Yeah, alright,” he says, shaking his head. “Whatever you want. Gravy by the gallon, all of it.”

Seemingly satisfied, Rimmer moves as if to head for the door, but before he can get there, Lister gets him by the wrist and turns him back and pulls him in with one clumsy movement and kisses him. Rimmer makes a soft noise against Lister’s mouth, surprised, and then Lister reaches around and shamelessly grabs a handful of his arse. Rimmer yelps, jolting upright, and Lister can’t stop himself from grinning against Rimmer’s mouth.

***


	10. Naked

**X**

It’s not often they can be bothered with making a special occasion out of holidays, but sometimes, when the weeks are dragging on and on without much excitement from anything in the vastness of deep space, they cling to banal, everyday celebrations.

They don’t have a Christmas tree, but they commandeer one of Rimmer’s old shoe trees and fuse it to a hat stand that they find on board a derelict, and they string it up with hazard lights and safety tape and whatever crappy decorations they can scrounge or create.

Kryten is excited at the prospect of creating a feast for the five thousand, along with all the tidying and mopping and dusting that comes with the preparations for it. Lister is just happy to have an excuse to wear ugly jumpers and get stupidly, dangerously drunk—although, as the Cat points out, _you do all year round anyway!_ —and the Cat is delighted by all the shiny things dangling around the place. Of all of them, Rimmer is the only one managing to remain miserable.

“What, I ask you, is the point of all this?” he demands of everything—presents, roast dinners, and in this particular instance, the carols they’ve got blaring through the speakers every hour of the day. “Surely there’s something more melodious we can listen to, like _Sounds of the Savannah: the exuberant screams of hippopotamus mating season_ ,” he snipes at Lister’s rendition of _White Christmas_ , and when he sees Kryten shelling Brussel sprouts, he wants to know why they don’t just skip all the ceremony and get straight to the toilet bowl where all of this will end up.

“God, you’re such a smegging misery guts, aren’t you, Rimmer?” Lister asks with exasperation as he struggles to cut out a paper snowflake.

“Not miserable, just pragmatic. I mean, let’s be realistic here. We’re three million years into deep space, none of us are religious, we’re too old to believe in all that Father Christmas nonsense, and we’re not even entirely sure that it’s December.”

“You’re just saying that because you know that you’re on the naughty list,” Lister says.

Rimmer sniffs. “Not necessarily.”

Lister laughs. “What, you reckon you’ve been a good boy this year? Spin on.”

“I am good! No, in fact, I’m better than good. I’m the best. Better than all you arse-faced, pathetic ingrown toenails.”

“Says a man definitely at the top of the nice list,” Lister points out. “It’s not a competition, Rimmer.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Rimmer says. “I’d have won something if it was.”

Lister shakes his head, “See? That’s the thing—it’s not about being superior to other people, it’s about trying to be good. You know, nice. Doing things for other people.” He unfolds his snowflake, flaps it out, and holds the paper up for inspection. It’s kind of fragile, torn in places, but mostly recognisable as a snowflake, he reckons. “What do you think of this, then?”

Rimmer pulls a face, considering. “Quite good, if the theme you’re going for is ‘shapeless blob of sneeze phlegm’.”

“It’s a snowflake, you twat.”

“Oh. Then, no. It’s terrible.”

Sighing, Lister crumples it into a ball and tosses it towards the bin. He misses, and it bounces off the wall to join the sea of scattered paper balls from his previous five thousand failures.

“But what’s the point of being nice if nothing comes out of it?” Rimmer asks. “I’ve tried being nice and I never got anywhere with it. I could share and smile and offer a shoulder to cry on until the cows come home, and it wouldn’t make a bleeding bit of difference. All it did was hold me back. If I gave my brothers an inch, they’d take a mile. No, ten miles. No, they’d take the entire mileage, trash the car, and leave me on the side of the road with the spare tyre and the cost of paying for the wreckage.”

“Your brothers aren’t here anymore,” Lister says, waving at the room around him with the scissors, and ignoring the way that Rimmer flinches back out of reach. “Christmas is supposed to be for having fun and getting pissed and celebrating, man. Presents and pigs in blankets, you know?”

“Well, I never had a Christmas like that,” Rimmer says stiffly. “Christmas in my family was time for reflections on your accomplishments from the last year. Every time one of us was a disappointment, our school pictures got demoted a spot further from the mantelpiece.” He pauses. “When I was thirteen, my mother decided to pre-empt any awkwardness and just moved my photograph out into the garden. Christmas was nothing more than a yearly exercise in humiliating mediocrity.”

“Cry me a river, Rimmer,” Lister says. “That’s why you’ve gotta try and make better times and traditions for yourself. I mean, take me—I got abandoned under a pool table, me foster dad died, I got bounced around from my gran to whoever else would feed me—I wasn’t exactly living the picture perfect Christmas card fantasy either. But I’m gonna make something of it, because if you just give up, nothing changes and nothing ever gets better.”

“Yes, but at least you were liked, you were wanted—”

“I was left,” Lister repeats, louder now and more emphatically, “under a _pool table_.”

“No, I know that—I meant afterwards. For the rest of your life. You’ve had friends, you’ve had girlfriends, you’ve had people who cared about you. I’ve never had that. I’ve never been in a Secret Santa where the organiser didn’t ‘accidentally’ forget to put my name in. I’ve never had mulled wine—”

“We offered you some at the last Christmas party on _Red Dwarf_ and you turned up your nose at it because it was, and I quote,” Lister says, in his best Rimmer impersonation, complete with the haughty blast of air exhaled through his nostrils, _too hot, ergo, unsafe, ergo, an attempt on my life, Lister, you’re on report_ , _miladdo—_ ”

“That wine was bubbling,” Rimmer retorts. “It was well above the boiling point—if I had drunk that, it would have dissolved my esophagus and left me drowning in my own torso soup.”

“The point is—”

“No, Lister, the point is,” Rimmer cuts in, “that it’s hard to care about Christmas when Christmas has never cared about you.”

Lister lifts his head, swings back on his chair, and tilts over towards the computer mounted in the corner of the room. “Can we cue the violins in here, please?” he calls.

“Just once in the simmering smeg-pit of my life,” Rimmer says resentfully, ignoring Lister’s theatrical interjections, which take the piss out of Rimmer’s overly dramatic _woes_ , “I wish someone, at any point, had loved me.”

“Well, I do,” Lister says.

“Oh, piss off.”

Lister sits back, blinking, taken aback although not offended. He’s got feelings like plasticine, he’ll ping right back in a minute, ready to get kicked in the teeth again. He raises his eyebrows. “Last time I try that, then,” he says, and reaches instead for another sheet of white paper for Snowflake Attempt 6024.

“Well, you don’t mean it,” Rimmer says crossly. “You just want me to shut up and stop being pathetic.”

True, there is that. Lister rolls his eyes, and he starts folding his new sheet paper into fours for a new snowflake. “I mean, I do want you to shut up and stop being pathetic, but that’s not why, and I do mean it, actually.” 

For a long moment, Rimmer is silent, and the only sound between them is the clumsy snip of Lister’s scissors as he haphazardly hacks out triangles. After a beat, Lister lifts his eyes to see Rimmer, who looks, if anything, deeply puzzled, his forehead creased like he’s doing algebra in his head.

Faltering, Rimmer says, “You mean—”

“Yeah.”

Another pause. “You…” Rimmer trails off uselessly.

“Yep.” Lister pops the P.

Rimmer’s face sort of screws itself up into a frown of immense proportions, his lip wrinkling. “Even though I’m—”

Lister sets down the scissors and paper heavily, exasperated. “Rimmer, I’m gonna go mental in a minute. _Yes_.” He holds Rimmer’s eyes, unflinching, and distantly, he thinks that only Rimmer could piss him off even as he’s trying to say that he’s in love with him. “Even though you’re you, and you’re unbearable, and you don’t half make it difficult sometimes, but mostly, yeah.” He gives a loose, lopsided shrug, and his voice softens only marginally. “More or less always.”

Rimmer seems floored by this. In a few steps, he crosses to the table and drops down heavily in the seat opposite Lister. “But— _why_?”

“I’m not writing you a smegging sonnet, Rimmer, take it or leave it.”

Silence again. Rimmer’s fingers fidget on the table top. Lister retrieves his already-mangled snowflake and gets back to work, trying to create some kind of pattern that might resemble anything even slightly wintry, although he doesn’t hold out much hope for it.

“Well.” Rimmer’s voice is clipped with embarrassment, and he reaches out for the pile of white paper, takes one, and starts slowly folding it into fours. “That changes things somewhat.”

Some of the tension seeps from Lister’s shoulders as he watches him… _helping._ “How?”

“Well, I don’t know what to do now, for one thing,” Rimmer says, keeping his eyes on his paper.

“You could start off by not being a dickhead.”

Rimmer gives him a flat look. “Now, Lister, let’s be realistic.”

Lister shakes his head, disbelieving, even as he feels a smile break out on his face. He settles instead for telling Rimmer where to find another pair of scissors, and they work together.

Either way, it works, as Rimmer does then—very begrudgingly—get involved in Christmas at last. He puts on his red suit for the occasion, and he helps in instructing Kryten with where to set decorations and he only complains a little bit about it. Then again, the term decorations should be used very loosely, as there’s a lot of improvisation involved. Mistletoe? Cluster of grapes taped to the top of the doorframe. Tinsel? Paper chains. Flour scattered on the floor makes for the snow to make a snow angel, and Rimmer remarks that he’s a few eggs short of a cake, so Lister has to see how many eggs he can juggle. Four, it turns out, as he discovers when he tries to add the fifth and breaks the lot on his own head. Kryten is delighted by the mess, like Lister’s deliberately trashed the place as a special holiday, and he rushes off to retrieve his mop.

Rimmer agrees to sing _We Wish You A Merry Christmas_ because he’s actually got quite a nice voice, and he leads them as conductor and only calls them mindless, ear-shattering, tone-deaf imbeciles once or twice, and knocks back his wine spritzer with the rest of them. Lister tears the cluster of makeshift mistletoe down from the wall and plants a big sloppy kiss on both Kryten and the Cat, neither of who seem that pleased to receive it; when Rimmer makes a fuss, Lister pulls him down by his ears and gets him too, leaving him pink and spluttering and, for once, with nothing to say.

It’s like this more or less all day, as agonising as that is to confess—when the Cat is determinedly trying to teach them some dance moves so that he won’t be embarrassed to be associated with them, and Rimmer at his tipsiest is all elbows and every limb is a left foot; when he goes into a needless, pedantic tirade about the correct method to Sellotape wrapping-paper creases, and he’s just banging on and on about the importance of symmetry in the corner triangles, his voice only getting louder every time he is interrupted; when Rimmer is feverishly trying to convince them all to at least _try_ Morris dancing before they knock it; when, generally, he is being the most mind-numbingly boring person in human history, and Lister still quite wants to shag him. Life is full of these surreal little mysteries.

When it comes down to gift-giving, it’s an exercise they all go into fully aware that presents are probably going to be crap. There’s precious little of anything interesting on _Starbug_ , so it’s down to whatever they can make, repurpose, or scrounge from a derelict, and no-one’s going in with high expectations.

They all give Kryten the same gift—an enormous pile of their combined dirty laundry—and Kryten’s eyes shine with tears of joy. “Oh, thank you,” he says, voice wobbling. “Just what I had wanted… how did you know?”

The three of them make mingled self-effacing noises.

“Oh, just—you know—”

“Had a bit of a think, throwing ideas round—”

“Brainstorming—”

“I ran out of clean silk socks,” the Cat interrupts shamelessly. “I forgot it was even Christmas, but my feet are getting cold!”

True to his word, the Cat hasn’t got anything for anyone else, but he’s pleased enough to take the other’s contributions for him—from Kryten, a mirror; from Rimmer, some of his wardrobe space; from Lister, an extension cable, so he can plug all his hair appliances at once.

“Thanks, buds,” the Cat exclaims, and licks the sleeve of Lister’s jacket when he gets too close.

For his own part, Lister lucks out: a book of guitar tabs from Kryten, and, from Rimmer, the offering is soft and squishy and comes wrapped in a plastic bag. When he shakes it out and tips the bag upside down, what falls out is fabric—narrow, flimsy, black and red-patterned, and exactly what Lister needed.

“Oh, cheers, man,” Lister says. “No idea what happened to my old hankie—this is perfect.” He wipes his face, where he’s pretty sure he had some chocolate crusted around the edges of his mouth, and then blows his nose with the hankie in one deafening, explosive honk.

“Sir,” Kryten says falteringly, and Lister looks up to see three faces staring back at him in mingled horror and disgust.

“What?”

“That’s not a hankie,” Rimmer says, looking viscerally repulsed. “God, Lister, you really are just a colossal skidmark on the toilet bowl of life, aren’t you? You primitive, revolting, primordial ooze—it’s a _cravat_.”

“Oh.” Lister flaps it out to re-examine it, and, yep, that makes sense. Posh, useless, nice to look at it—the cravat and Rimmer both. He gives it a good shake and drapes it artfully around his neck. “A bit damp, but that’s alright. It’s nice. Thanks, Rimmer.”

Rimmer rolls his eyes. He seems thoroughly committed to the little performance of being irritated that he’s putting on, but Lister does catch him glancing over to check, now and then, that Lister is still wearing it, and he seems begrudgingly pleased. It’s surprisingly thoughtful, you know, for Rimmer, and it leaves Lister feeling slightly self-conscious about his own gift.

“Here,” he says, and he passes over a folded piece of paper. At one point he thought about finding an envelope, or at the very least a card, but he couldn’t be arsed, so he just folded some A4 into quarters and called it a day.

What Rimmer unfolds then is a voucher for twenty-four hours of peace and quiet _(subject to terms and conditions: not to be used if anyone is in danger or to win an argument or to be a dickhead)_ and for a moment, Rimmer seems floored by it, genuinely speechless for the first time ever.

Then, after a beat, Rimmer says, “Can this be redeemed multiple times, or—”

“Don’t push your luck.”

Dinner is chaos, when it comes. Kryten is following instructions from a salvaged recipe dating back to the twenty-second century, using copious quantities of ingredients that either no longer exist, were eco-friendly products later banned as carcinogens, or were so inaccessible in the remote regions of deep space that most of it got substituted anyway. 

They sing carols and light candles and then hurriedly blow the candles back out, flapping sheets of metal to disperse smoke from lingering by the fire alarms before they can start screaming; they eat chocolates and Kryten tells them off for spoiling their appetite. They’re all halfway drunk before Kryten has even finished setting the table, and Rimmer comes over, right into Lister’s space, to tell him off.

“That’s not how you wear a cravat,” he tells Lister disdainfully. “You’ve not got a sophisticated bone in your body, have you?”

Lister peers down at himself, nonplussed, at what he thought was a pretty stylish arrangement. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Well, for a start, you’re wearing it like a scarf,” Rimmer tells him, and without waiting for any kind of invitation, he starts fiddling with it while Lister is still wearing it.

“Wait, what?” Lister stares at him, bewildered. “I thought it was a scarf! If it’s not a scarf and it’s not a hankie, then what the smeg—”

“It’s for getting into fancy restaurants and business-class airplane lounges,” Rimmer says, pulling at the ends of the cravat—silk slipping coolly over Lister’s skin, susurrus against the leather collar of his jacket, goosebumps prickling on the back of his neck—to get it even, “and it’s more like a tie than a scarf.”

“Oh,” Lister says, intelligently. Rimmer’s fingertips bump against Lister’s Adam’s apple, graze over the hollow of his throat. He’s doing something with the cravat, an over-under-round-and-round routine that Lister should probably be paying attention to, but truth be told, he’s a little distracted. Lister’s hands fidget at his sides against the impulse to touch him, to pull him closer. He’s too conscious of his breathing, Rimmer too close to him, and when he swallows, Rimmer’s eyes flick up from the cravat to his face. To his eyes—to his mouth.

Rimmer wets his lips mechanically, and his hands become still, but he doesn’t lower them from Lister’s throat, his fingers still loosely twisted into the cravat. 

“There you go,” he says. His voice is quieter than it should be. “Just like that.”

This isn’t the way round it’s supposed to go, Lister thinks. Rimmer is the one who gets flustered. Winding him up, making him stammer and scowl and go red, it’s the easiest thing in the world. It’s not supposed to be Lister who looks at him and can’t think of a single thing except how badly he wants to kiss him. 

“Cheers, man,” Lister says. He goes for bluff and bravado, lifting his chin with, “You gonna kiss me, or what?” but it doesn’t come out the way he planned. All of a sudden he’s sort of breathless, and it doesn’t sound nearly as cocky and confident as he wanted it to, and what’s worst of all is that Rimmer just blinks at him, surprised, and doesn’t move.

“Lister—” he says, quieter still, hesitant, and then gets no further, because Kryten chooses that exact moment to come bursting through with a heavily-laden tray of a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, and all the fanfare of the Changing of the Guard.

“Dinner, gentlemen, is served!” Kryten declares emphatically.

Rimmer’s hands drop from Lister’s throat and he takes one neat step backwards. Lister lets his breath out, slowly deflates. He’s nothing if not irrepressible, so he isn’t going to take that one personally. Feelings like plasticine, he reminds himself. Bounce right back.

Together they crowd around the table for Kryten’s bizarro Christmas concoction, scrambling into their chairs and trying not to knock things over—and failing. They’re all so used to Rimmer not having a body—Rimmer included—that it’s easy to forget. All day he’s been tripping over wires, bumping into boxes, banging his head against the low door-frame into the kitchen, and generally making an enormous, clumsy but hilarious nuisance of himself; now, he knocks over drinks, sends cutlery clattering to the floor, gets his elbow in the horseradish sauce, and the best part of the whole thing is that no-one is more annoyed by it than Rimmer himself.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he says, sitting down and accidentally jostling the table leg with his knee in a way that sends a bowl of peas rolling wildly towards freedom, and Kryten looks as though he’s considering smacking him with a wooden spoon.

They don’t have Christmas crackers but they’re able to replicate the experience: Lister uses a screwdriver to short out one of the doors with a deafening bang at the same time as Kryten throws handfuls of cheap tat at everyone, like nail-clippers and a miniature Rubix Cube, and then they all tell their worst joke, which for Rimmer takes about fifteen minutes and he drops the punch-line too early, but Kryten still laughs obediently and Lister is just happy he’s there. The Cat refuses to wear one of their homemade paper hats, even as painstakingly as Kryten had cut and glued it—because, _vermillion with lime? Over my dead body_ —so Lister wears two piled on top of each other.

“Merry Christmas, all,” Lister announces with delight, cracking his lager with a spray of foam that makes both Rimmer and the Cat flinch back out of range.

Under the table, Rimmer’s leg jiggles absently as Kryten dishes out food, and every now and then when his knee bumps Lister’s under the table, Rimmer lifts his eyes to look at Lister in a way that’s totally unreadable. Lister likes to think he’s pretty shameless, but it takes him most of the way through his roast potatoes to psych himself up to nudging Rimmer under the table with his foot. Rimmer cocks his eyebrows, says nothing, but he looks as relaxed and even-tempered as Lister’s ever seen him, and his ankle rolls over to rest the side of his foot against Lister’s.

Lister can feel the big, dumb smile that spreads across his face, and he’s helpless to dial it back—and what’s more, Rimmer doesn’t even complain once about his _inane, gormless grin._ At one point, he even smiles back.

It’s not exactly a conventional Christmas dinner—even before Lister starts slopping curry sauce on his roast potatoes to make them more palatable—but they manage to get the right atmosphere going. They start with reminiscing over old Christmases, past celebrations, what it was like back when the crew was alive, and then, as usual, it segues into increasingly stupid drunken stories.

“Do you remember that time when I mixed my tetrachloromethane spritzer with methylmagnesium bromide, and it fired the top of my head off like a cannon?” Kryten says. 

“Oh, yeah,” Lister exclaims. “that was when we invented Flying Scalp Baseball!” 

Kryten reminds him, “And also how you broke the window in corridor thirteen and nearly got sucked out into space.”

“But what a way to go,” Lister sighs.

Rimmer recoils. “Your insides would be floating around your outsides! You’d be a bigger mess than a Milton Keynes roundabout.”

“And you’d be floating out there forever,” the Cat says, “like a big, frozen, ugly piñata.”

“Except instead of being filled with goodies, it’s a madras minefield.”

“Anyway, we’ve had bigger drunken cock-ups,” Lister interjects. “If I remember rightly, wasn’t the Cat the one who turned off the safety alarm because you were complaining you couldn’t get a good night’s sleep, and we all nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning?”

“How was I supposed to know what that annoying little beeping sound meant?" the Cat says defensively.

“Hang on,” Rimmer says. “If I may just point out, Lister, just how many times how you inadvertently destroyed something in the drive room by spilling a lager on it?”

“And if I had a grey hair for every time you’ve broken something by fiddling with it, ‘ _just to see what it’d do’_ ,” the Cat chips in, “I’d be as ugly as you are!”

“Let’s face it, Listy,” Rimmer says. “You’ve not got a great track record.”

Lister scowls at him. “Well, hey, you’ve perked up.”

“I know. It’s the thrill of not being the most unpopular person in the room. It’s quite intoxicating, actually.”

As one, almost as if on cue, Lister, Kryten, and the Cat all turn and start going through every stupid thing Rimmer has ever done— _what about when you dicked about in the hologram projection suite and turned yourself German—do you not remember, sir, when you wiped out an entire planet of wax-droids—hang on, and what exactly happened with that hair-brained Tension Sheet scheme of yours, except for—didn’t you accidentally flush an entire roomful of medical supplies out of an airlock—_ and Rimmer protests indignantly.

“And let’s not forget,” Lister says loudly, over the rabble of voices, “if we want to get technical about people _breaking things in the drive room—_ ”

“Now, now, Lister,” Rimmer says. “Let’s not quibble over—”

“—why don’t we revisit that one, tiny, miniscule incident where—”

“—I really don’t see any reason to—”

“—you didn’t fix a drive plate properly and killed everyone?”

Rimmer sits back in his seat. “Well,” he says. “Well. That was just—just—” He grimaces. “It was only an accident.”

Lister laughs, and goes to throw a Yorkshire pudding through Rimmer’s head — and clean forgets that he’s hard-light until the split-second before it hits him full in the face with a sort of squidgy thump.

When they all gasp, Rimmer looks more startled than anyone — to be honest, he’s used to having things thrown through him — and as he slowly looks down at the traitorous Yorkshire where it landed on the table, a dribble of gravy slowly oozes down the length of his nose.

Lister braces himself from the onslaught of Rimmer’s rage, expecting the usual tirade against the disrespect, the immaturity, the frivolous wastefulness. What he doesn’t expect in the least is for Rimmer to pick up the Yorkshire, weigh it carefully in one hand, and then hurl it, full-force, back across the table and right between Lister’s eyes.

Lister yelps, the Cat screams with delight, and Kryten recoils, aghast, but then there’s not a moment to waste, because Rimmer is sitting there looking smug and entirely too pleased with himself, and that is a face that desperately needs a glob of mushy peas launched at it if ever Lister saw one.

The food fight that ensues is one of the messiest and most chaotic that Lister’s taken part in since his school days. Kryten is the one who brings in the mashed potato trebuchet with the spoon fired over the edge of the bowl, while the Cat simply starts grabbing handfuls of turkey, flinging it wildly and indiscriminately round the table. Rimmer tries to pour gravy over Lister’s head, Lister grabs him by the wrists and grapples to fight him off, which leaves both wide open for being mercilessly pelted by roast parsnip on all sides.

“Alright, alright,” Lister yells, his wrestling match with Rimmer taking a turn for the worse as his locs start dragging through the cranberry sauce. “Get off—get _off_! Alright, you win. You bastard.”

“A bastard who thoroughly trounced you,” Rimmer says gleefully. “All hail A.J Rimmer, reigning champion of throwing bits of potato around.”

“The reigning champion of making a big mess,” Kryten says.

“You’re welcome,” Rimmer says. “Merry Christmas.”

“Oh, sirs, you shouldn’t have,” Kryten says, almost humming with delight, and he clasps his hands together. “I haven’t seen such a disaster since Britney in 2007. What a mess! The mopping, the wiping — this’ll take me most of the day!” His voice wobbles. “Thank you, sirs. Thank you.”

“Only the best for my Kryters,” Lister says fondly, and he claps a hand to Kryten’s back. He glances across at Rimmer, who has a sliver of turkey in his hair and mushy peas all down his jacket, and who is almost smiling even as he picks bits out of his collar.

Rimmer lifts his head and meets Lister’s eyes, and his smile falters for a second. That’s when Lister realises that he is grinning at him like a total idiot—and then Rimmer ducks his head, embarrassed, and Lister drags himself away from the faint flush climbing Rimmer’s jaw, because that’s territory he doesn’t want to focus on too much and he doesn’t want to think about how that’s the same kind of flushed that Rimmer gets when he’s hopelessly turned on, and—Lister is thinking about it. Damn it.

Lister clears his throat, and he tunes back into the conversation as they start to discuss whether it’s time to move onto pudding.

They serve out the Christmas cake—a chocolate cake with ‘ _MERRY CHRISTMAS’_ written on it in wobbly writing, because Lister would rather drop dead than eat fruit cake. There’s a thick slice for each of them, and Lister scoffs his in four big bites, and then as they’re setting up to play Bullshit, he reaches across to grab Rimmer’s slice and takes a big bite out before setting it back.

Rimmer doesn’t so much as blink, totally unphased by it. Lister sucks gooey chocolatey icing from his fingers and gestures with his free hand for Kryten to deal him in.

Bullshit is always a laugh because Kryten still struggles with lie-mode, and the Cat barely understands the rules, and Lister calls bullshit on every single card that Rimmer plays whether he believes him or not, because he likes watching him get snippy and defensive. Either way, it ends badly for them, because one or the other of them goes down for it every turn, so they’ve only been going fifteen minutes and Lister’s there shirtless in his black jeans and bare feet while Rimmer sits there in his boxers and white undershirt and those stupid sock suspenders hiked up his calves. Kryten is only partially disassembled—he’s sacrificed four fingers and his nose—while the Cat has been shedding various fashionable outer layers without ever actually looking any less immaculate, as he scatters pocket-squares and nice jackets and dangly accessories galore.

“Seven of diamonds.”

“Eight of diamonds.”

“Eight of spades.”

“Three eights,” Rimmer says, and puts his hand down just as Lister shouts, “Bullshit!”

“Why?” Rimmer squawks.

“That’s five eights altogether, you dork.”

“One of them could be lying, not me!” Rimmer says defensively.

Lister tilts his head back and forth as though weighing it up. “Still think you’re the liar, though.”

Rimmer lets his breath out in an angry burst. “Bollocks!”

Lister reaches across to flip his cards over—a three, a Jack, and a Queen—as Rimmer resigns himself with a sigh to unhooking one of his sock suspenders. Lister wolf-whistles, loud and shrill enough that the Cat flinches and jerks away like he’s considering diving under the table.

“Go on, give us a twirl, Rimmer,” Lister jeers. “Swing it round your head.”

Rimmer gives him a withering look. “Ha-ha.” However, he does stretch it between his fingers like a sling-shot and fire it at Lister, and Lister doesn’t duck out of the way, but snaps at it like he’s trying to catch it in his teeth, although he fails miserably and it hits him in the shoulder.

The Cat asks if he’s feeling okay, since Rimmer in a good mood is rarer than a stag night in a vegan restaurant, and Rimmer doesn’t even have a smart-arse answer. He just collects his terrible hand from the discard pile, looking smaller and softer and sillier than Lister is used to seeing him, and the ache in the pit of Lister’s chest is so familiar to him it’s like an old bruise. 

Lister reaches past to grab another mouthful of Rimmer’s cake, spraying crumbs everywhere when the slice is too big for his mouth, and as the game goes on he tries his hardest not to think about getting his hands on Rimmer’s hips, hauling him in for a kiss.

It’s decided, then: he’s gonna have sex with him. Tonight, or he’s gonna die trying.

***

It’s getting late now, Christmas festivities winding down for the night. The Cat is fast asleep, napping off a full twenty-three course meal mostly consisting of pigs in blankets, and Lister is just nicely drunk, his paper hat lopsided on his head. Kryten is off somewhere, having removed and washed his head after getting too much turnip mash in his ears and short-circuiting his good taste chip. A handful of crap jokes and some casual misogyny had sent Kryten scuttling back to his quarters in shame to recalibrate.

That leaves Rimmer and Lister finishing up the last round of beers in their sleeping quarters, having attempted to escape the mess downstairs and creating an entirely different mess instead.

“Right, well,” Rimmer says, from where he is sitting at the table. He stretches, the appearance of nonchalance, except for the way that his voice shoots higher than normal. “I’m—erm. I’m going to turn in for the night.”

It’s now or never, Lister reckons. He removes his paper hat and crumples it into a ball. Then he takes a deep breath, sits back heavily in his chair, and he says, “No, you’re not."

Rimmer blinks at him. “What?”

Lister kicks his feet up to prop his heels on the table. “Let’s talk about what’s been going on.”

“You’ll have to be a smidgen more specific, there,” Rimmer says, but he looks distinctly nervous, and Lister is pretty sure he’s stalling for time—probably trying to surreptitiously come up with an exit strategy.

“I mean,” Lister says, drumming his fingers on the table top, “how we’ve spent the last six years devising more and more ingenious ways of pretending to shag each other, and now that we actually can, you’re about as horny as a Buddhist monk.”

Rimmer says, “Ah.” Less surreptitious now—Rimmer glances fearfully towards the door.

“You won’t make it,” Lister warns him. “You can’t just ghost through me anymore.”

Rimmer’s mouth presses into a thin line.

Lister folds his arms across his chest. “I mean, are we talking cold feet here? Cold ankles, knees? What?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“So what? What’s changed since you got a body?”

“Well, I stub my toe a lot more now.”

Lister just looks at him flatly.

“I just—” Rimmer gestures helplessly. “I think we might have built this up in our heads too much. I think we’ve overinflated the idea of what this—us—would be like.”

“Rimmer, I’ve been working with me own right hand for six years. Anything is an improvement on that. My palms are worn smoother than the Michelin man. I’m getting carpal tunnel over here. There’s no way that you could be a let-down.”

“Thank you. I have always aspired to the dizzying heights of ‘ _not a total write-off_ ’’. I should be an off-brand supermarket—my slogan could be ‘the mediocre alternative’.”

“Rimmer, what’re you on about?”

“I just wonder if it was easier for us to imagine how good we’d be together, instead of—”

“Can you hear yourself?” Lister demands. “Are you seriously suggesting we just go on _imagining_ having sex with each other, instead of _actually having sex_? What is going on? You never shut up about sex for love nor money, and now suddenly, Mr. Chastity over here thinks that maybe getting his end away isn’t worth—”

“I’m going to be bad at it!” Rimmer shouts, losing his temper.

“You were bad at it the first time and I still wanted a second go!”

Rimmer’s mouth snaps shut.

“You called me names, didn’t even get me undressed, finished in three minutes, and then fell asleep,” Lister points out. “And I still came back, you stupid, gormless twat.”

Rimmer stares at him, seemingly dumbfounded.

“You said it yourself, I’m the easiest thing on the ship,” Lister says. “I’ll shag anything—I’ll come back whatever happens because it’s better than nothing. It’s better than smegging pretending. I don’t care if you’re bad at it. I don’t care if you want to dress me up in feathers and call me Daffy— _I do not care_. I’ll come back whatever. I couldn’t give a flying fart.”

For a long moment, Rimmer says nothing. His eyes track slowly over Lister’s face, weighing him up.

"Would you really?” he says eventually, voice low and uncertain. “Be okay with it, I mean. If I was terrible.”

“I quadruple pinky-swear it,” Lister says, and before Rimmer can say anything—before he can lose his nerve—Lister gets up and crosses the room to him. He shrugs out of his leather jacket as he goes, lets it drop and leaves it abandoned on the floor, and then he climbs easily into Rimmer’s lap.

Rimmer swallows. Underneath Lister’s weight, his right leg is jiggling ferociously. “I don’t think this chair is going to support us both for very long,” he says, and his voice is strained.

Lister slings his arms loosely around Rimmer’s neck. “Then I suppose we should go to bed.”

Rimmer’s eyes are wide and dark. He wets his lips, a rough, mechanical gesture, but his eyes are on Lister’s mouth. “Yes,” he says, and kisses him.

The first press of his lips is soft, unsure. His hands come to rest on Lister’s waist, less like he’s holding Lister and more like he’s holding on, and it feels like he’s restraining himself. Lister pulls back a fraction, capturing his lower lip, and something hitches in Rimmer’s chest—a breath, a swallowed noise—and then Rimmer’s mouth opens over his and he is kissing him back, kissing him properly. Lister can feel it sparking all down his spine, fizzing all the way to his toes.

Lister’s arms tighten around Rimmer’s neck, and he presses in closer, close enough that he squashes Rimmer’s nose and the chair groans and Rimmer’s breath snags again. Then, the unthinkable—Rimmer does something spontaneous.

Out of nowhere, Rimmer hooks his hands underneath Lister’s thighs and as he stands, he lifts him up—and then something goes wrong, Rimmer’s foot skidding out from under their combined weight, or he’s not gripped Lister tight enough or held him up high enough, and they crash down together onto the table. Beer bottles go rolling to the floor, but Lister doesn’t care much because he drags Rimmer down with him when he lands, and Rimmer is heavy between Lister’s thighs, pinning him to the table, and it seems that in the last three million years, Rimmer’s figured out how to kiss Lister like he means it.

His mouth is hot and urgent, and Lister has both his hands in Rimmer’s hair to hold him there so that he can push his tongue into Rimmer’s mouth and suck on his bottom lip and do all the things that Rimmer likes to get him to make that noise—that one, the little breathless sigh in the back of his throat, and his hips push back against Lister’s and he’s mostly hard already and it’s so fucking good that Lister can barely believe it’s real.

There is a puddle of something sticky under Lister’s shoulder and he’s lying on the ends of his own locs in a way that kind of tugs at the crown of his head painfully, and the table groans under their weight when Rimmer presses in close, and Lister at last has to acknowledge that this is not the best way to do this. He slides his hands down to Rimmer’s shoulders, pushes him back far enough to breathe—Rimmer breathing ragged, his mouth pink and wet in a way that makes Lister absolutely not want to do anything else other than keep kissing him, except maybe to find other things for his mouth to do—and he gathers enough self-restraint to say, “Off the table.”

Rimmer nods. “Good idea.”

He gets to his feet inelegantly, winces as he adjusts his trousers—trousers which Lister has admired a lot over the last few years for how tight they are, but which are probably pretty unforgiving now. Then again, Lister thinks as he scrambles up from the table, that’s pretty easily remedied, and he grabs Rimmer’s hips in both hands and steers him clumsily, stumblingly, backwards until his back hits the wall by the bunk recesses.

Pushing up onto tiptoes to press Rimmer into the wall, Lister kisses him again. Rimmer cups a hand around the back of Lister’s neck to tilt Lister’s face deeper into the kiss, and Lister doesn’t know if it’s the three million years of pining or if Rimmer has genuinely got better at snogging because he opens his mouth and Lister feels lit up with it, every nerve in his body sparking. The slow, slick slide of Rimmer’s tongue has Lister’s fingers tightening on Rimmer’s hips, and he wants him so badly that he feels it like a pulse through his entire body.

Without pulling back for a second, Lister goes for Rimmer’s trousers, fumbling with the button and fly, and it’s a heady rush to feel the thick ridge of Rimmer’s dick underneath, and more addictive still when Lister palms roughly over it and Rimmer’s breath catches in his throat. Lister struggles for a moment, unable to understand why these stupid smegging trousers aren’t coming down, absolutely no give at all, and then Rimmer is yanking at the clasps of his own jacket, and he says, “Braces.”

Lister swears, and Rimmer gets about half the clasps of his jacket undone before Lister gets impatient and starts cutting corners, rummaging along Rimmer’s waistline for the braces clips.

“Hold on, hold on,” Rimmer pants, and Lister doesn’t, and then one side of Rimmer’s braces pings and gets him in the side. “Ow! Lister, will you—”

Lister pushes his hand through Rimmer’s fly and grabs a handful of his dick, and that shuts him up pretty quick, his complaint cutting out with a gasp. Incredibly, they cooperate, working together—Rimmer wrestling out of his jacket to reveal the plain blue T-shirt underneath, Lister snapping the other side of his braces off and working his trousers down. Shoes, socks, the smegging sock suspenders—those disappear somewhere as well, while Lister kicks off his own boots, and then he presses a hand against Rimmer’s chest.

“Get in the bunk.”

It’s a miracle: Rimmer does as he’s told.

Lister climbs in after him, clambering awkwardly over his gangly legs to kneel between his knees, and he finally, finally gets to the business of kissing Rimmer everywhere. He shoves up the hem of Rimmer’s T-shirt to get at his stomach, mouthing at his hipbone, the soft skin beneath his navel, peeling away his stupid, ugly white boxers in the process. Rimmer, half-sprawled, propped up on his elbows, watches him, breathing unsteadily.

“Lister,” Rimmer says, his voice hoarse, and gets no further.

At last Lister gets Rimmer’s boxers down, at least to somewhere near his knees. Rimmer’s dick bumps against the corner of Lister’s jaw, leaves a wet line of pre-come there, and Rimmer’s hips rock uselessly, but Lister ignores him. He splays a hand over Rimmer’s hip, holds him still as he bites at Rimmer’s skin, sucks at him to leave sharp, aching bruises on his hips, lays open-mouthed kisses everywhere he can reach. He takes Rimmer’s dick in his mouth.

God, it’s better than Lister imagined—the weight of him on his tongue, the salty taste of him, the low, voiceless sound Rimmer makes in the back of his throat. His hips shift impatiently, but Lister gets a hand on each hip and pins him flat, sucks him down.

It’s been a long time since Lister did this to anyone, and he’s a little sloppy, his mouth wet and slack, but Rimmer’s not complaining—his head tips back, his throat working, and he lets out a groan that seems hooked from deep within his chest. After a moment, his elbows wobble and give out, and he flops to lie back helpless on the mattress. His hand finds the back of Lister’s head, his fingers scratching through his hair, and his every inhalation wobbles on a low, desperate noise as he comes apart. Lister wants it, wants it more than he’s wanted anything in years.

He presses the tip of his thumb against the space behind Rimmer’s balls and revels in the way his back arches off the mattress; his hips rock to push deeper into Lister’s mouth and Lister lets him, takes him as far as he can until his eyes water and his jaw aches. Rimmer is making this involuntary whimper in the back of his throat as his hips snap up to fuck Lister’s mouth, the way Lister knows he wants it, the way Lister's described it for him countless times. Lister slides a hand round behind Rimmer to grab a handful of his arse, pulls him in to encourage him, _yeah, keep going, keep going, more_ , because he wants to take Rimmer there.

Then Rimmer’s hand is squeezing Lister’s shoulder, all of his breath coming in a desperate burst, and he covers his face with one hand. “Lister—Lister, wait. Stop, I’m—”

Lister pulls off and lifts his head to look at Rimmer. He can feel that he must look pretty rough, his mouth wet and smeared with spit and pre-come, but it’s hard to really care about that when he looks at Rimmer. Flushed and breathless and trembling and biting his bottom lip, hair wild, brow furrowed, T-shirt rucked up to his ribs, narrow thighs spread open with his dick curving up from his belly, looking every inch like a picture that Lister would have furiously wanked off to when he was younger.

With a deep breath, Lister scrubs over his mouth with the back of his hand. “What?”

“I—I—just was—I—if—should—” Rimmer’s voice is all over the place and he’s not making any sense. He pinches the bridge of his nose between index finger and thumb, and takes a long, slow, steadying breath. It doesn’t seem to help much. His thighs are shaking under Lister’s hands. He reaches down and grabs his own dick tightly at the base, and he breathes slowly through his teeth. “I just—I think—shall we slow down? For a bit. Or—or I won’t—I’m—”

“It’s fine, Rimmer,” Lister says, and he rubs Rimmer’s thigh in a way that is meant to be comforting. “It doesn’t matter if you come now, it’s still gonna be good. We’ve got all the time in the world.” He grins at him. “Besides, you’ll have time to sort yourself out again, because it’ll take a while to get ready so that you can fuck me.”

Wrong thing to say, apparently. Or the right thing. Rimmer comes.

There’s not much warning, just a gasp and one short groan, and then three million years’ worth of pent-up sexual frustration inadvertently hits Lister full in the face. He winces, shutting his eyes, and when Rimmer’s breath has mostly evened out, he peeks out to see Rimmer looking absolutely mortified.

“Oh, ey,” Lister says, perfectly calm and cheerful. “Thanks for the heads-up, man.”

Rimmer stares at him, eyes wide. “Sorry,” he manages, and does genuinely sound bereft. He adds, “I did try to warn you.”

Lister gives a conciliatory nod. “You did. You okay?”

“Yes—thank you. Hang on,” Rimmer says, and he reaches up for a box of tissues from the shelf behind his pillow. He tugs out a handful, sits up, and he carefully wipes Lister’s face clean.

Lister watches his face as he works, his furrowed expression of concentration, and wonders if it’s weird for him to be this into how clean Rimmer is, how meticulously tidy and fastidious. It’s annoying a lot of the time, Rimmer’s fussiness, but at the minute it’s also strangely a turn-on as he dabs at Lister’s cheeks with tiny, precise movements.

Lister lifts a hand to his own face, wipes away a splatter of come with his thumb, and pushes it into his mouth to suck it clean. Rimmer goes still, tissue clenched in hand, and he makes a strangled noise that Lister thinks he’s probably unconscious of, his mouth falling open as he watches. Lister pulls his thumb from his mouth, then leans forwards, still knelt as he is between Rimmer’s thighs, and he kisses him. He slides his tongue into Rimmer’s soft, slack mouth, lets him see how good he tastes.

Rimmer sighs into it, and his hand, still holding the tissues, finds Lister’s jaw. When he kisses back, it’s all slow, languid heat, breathing him deep. He captures Lister’s wet lower lip, licks into Lister’s mouth, and that slow-burning heat in Lister’s gut is kicking up to a steady furnace. He still hasn’t been touched, and that’s a need that occupies about ninety-eight percent of his brain-cells as Rimmer starts working at the buttons of his boiler suit, keenly aware of his dick straining against the rough cotton.

“Besides,” Lister says as he climbs in closer, braces his knees either side of Rimmer’s hips, “I’m not against you getting one off early for the sake of a little longevity,” he pauses as he sits down in Rimmer’s lap, letting out a long, slow breath as he finds friction, finally, in pressing his dick against Rimmer’s stomach, “when we get to the main event.”

“The main event,” Rimmer repeats, his voice stretched thin, and his fingers stutter on the buttons near Lister’s navel. “You mean… me, erm… rogering you.”

Lister sits back, holds him at arms’ length, and stares at him. Idly, for a moment, he wonders if it’s possible to retroactively unfuck someone. “You can’t be smegging serious.”

Rimmer’s face creases into a frown. “I don’t understand—you’re fine with sucking me off, but you've changed your mind all of a sudden, and anything up the arse is a step too far, is it?”

“Did you look that up in the Dictionary of the World’s Least Sexy Sentences?” Lister says. “Because that was like a wet handshake to my sex-drive.”

“What’s wrong? You’re the one who just suggested it—”

Lister drags a hand down over his face. “It’s not the action that I’m having a problem with, Rimmer, it’s the vocabulary.”

“Well, what would you rather I call it? Knob-jockeying? Buggery? A ride on the Rimmer rollercoaster— _you must be at least this tall to_ —”

“Oh my God, Rimmer,” Lister says, and he kisses him. He slides his hands underneath Rimmer’s rumpled T-shirt, and everywhere he touches him, Rimmer’s skin is hot and smooth, the hair fine and soft.

Lister knows what he likes, scrapes his nails down Rimmer’s sides and is rewarded by the hitching of his breath, a long slow sigh. Rimmer tilts his forehead into the side of Lister’s face, breathing shallowly with his lips at the corner of Lister’s mouth, and Lister dips to kiss Rimmer’s jaw. He presses open-mouthed kisses to the skin below Rimmer’s ear, then lower, the hinge of his jaw, the bump of his scar, and he lingers there longer than he really should. He can feel Rimmer getting impatient, his hips shifting against nothing, but Lister has been wanting to get his mouth on Rimmer like this for a good few millennia and he reckons he deserves to get to take his time.

Lister licks a line up the length of Rimmer’s throat, drags his mouth over the scar, sucks a mark into the hollow of his jaw—and Rimmer’s hips snap forwards to grind against him. Their dicks drag together, and Lister feels want sparking hotter and hotter underneath his skin. He drifts a hand up over Rimmer’s chest, and when he finds his nipple, Rimmer makes this ragged sound that has Lister hot all over. Lister pulls back far enough to tug Rimmer’s T-shirt up, and Rimmer gets with the programme, yanks it over his head and discards it blindly on the floor somewhere, and then he gets busy with Lister’s clothes again, unbuttoning the boiler suit, pulling at the long-johns underneath, trying to get it all off.

Rimmer shoves impatiently at Lister’s clothes, although his ‘help’ at getting Lister undressed is less than helpful as Lister gets caught in his sleeves—but then he pauses, nostrils flaring wildly. He inhales deeply, a frown creasing his forehead, and then he leans in closer until he is almost pressing his face into Lister’s throat again, and sniffs.

“Erm, Rimmer,” Lister says, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt here. “You alright?”

“Have you…” Rimmer pauses, the look on his face pure incredulity. “Have you _washed_?”

Lister sits back. “I mean,” he says haltingly, and God, this is embarrassing. He can feel his face burning, and he knows he likes to make fun of how endearing it is when Rimmer gets all hot and bothered, but this is different because it’s _him_ now. “I mean—maybe.” So sue him! Sometimes a guy decides he wants to get dicked by his neurotic hologramatic room-mate and goes for a shower to prepare for it. Sometimes a special occasion merits a quick going-over of the pits and arsehole and bollocks with a wet flannel—it’s not a crime. He points a finger into Rimmer’s face. “Well, don’t say I never do nothing for you.”

Rimmer shakes his head, but his little smile is genuinely pleased, and there is something like awe lighting up his face. “Listy,” he says, in that smug, smarmy voice, “I’m almost touched.”

Lister raises his eyebrows. “Almost?” he says, and he reaches down to grab a handful of Rimmer’s dick.

Rimmer’s breath stutters, and his hand flies up to grip Lister’s bicep. He’s not quite hard yet, but he’s getting there, which is pretty good going for a dead guy on the far side of thirty. When Lister rubs his thumb over the head of Rimmer’s dick, he can feel him thickening under his fingers and Rimmer makes a low noise which sparks want all down Lister’s spine.

“What I want to know,” Rimmer says breathlessly, his eyes on Lister’s mouth, “is why you wouldn’t just go the whole hog and wash your clothes as well?”

Lister laughs. “Steady on, Rimmer, we’re not getting married.” He sits back to wiggle out of the rest of his clothes and then crawls back to kiss Rimmer again, slow and open-mouthed. Against his lips, he asks, “You got any lube kicking about on your little wank shelf?”

“It’s not a wank shelf,” Rimmer protests, but then Lister reaches past him, knocking aside a few bits and bobs—an empty mug, a battered copy of _The Guns of August_ , a pot of some kind of clearly ineffectual hair product, a lint roller—until he comes up triumphant with a jar of Vaseline.

Lister brandishes it in Rimmer’s face. “So—you dealing with some nappy rash at the minute, or—”

“Oh, shut up,” Rimmer says.

There’s fumbling with the cap, and then Lister reaches behind himself to start working himself open. It’s old hat, this—shoving a finger up his arse while he jerks himself off is just a regular Sunday evening for him—but it’s different now, with Rimmer watching, with Rimmer’s hand on his hip and the solid warmth of his body underneath him. The first touch is always a shock—cold and wet with lube—as he presses gently at the rim of his hole, and Lister jerks a little, hisses between his teeth. He holds still, breathes, and pushes deeper.

Rimmer is breathing shallowly. His eyes move between Lister’s face and his dick trapped between their bodies, and his fingers flex nervously on Lister’s hip.

“You gonna join in or what?” Lister goads him, even as he pushes deeper, fucks himself to the first knuckle and feels heat spike up through his abdomen.

“I—” Rimmer swallows. “I’ve never done this before,” he admits.

Lister grins at him. “It’s alright, Rimmer. I’ll go easy on you.”

Rimmer looks faintly terrified, but also that redness is rising on his jaw again and his eyes are dark and Lister knows him well enough by now to read desire in every inch of his gangly frame. He reaches around, and the first touch of his lube-greased fingertip is tentative, clumsy, but Lister lifts his hips for him, rolls back slowly to help Rimmer along, and then Rimmer is making a funny choked sound as Lister’s body takes him easily, both of their fingers side by side.

The initial discomfort gives way to a different kind of ache, a stretch that wants more, faster, and Lister grips Rimmer’s forearm with his free hand. “More,” he tells him.

Rimmer fucks Lister with his fingers, a slow, careful push and pull. Lister rocks back onto his hand, harder now, harder still, and Rimmer is gasping and hard against Lister’s thigh and God, Lister wants to ride him through the floor.

“Yeah, there you go,” Lister says, his voice scratchy, and his fingers tighten on Rimmer’s arm, and Rimmer presses his face into Lister’s throat, a hand on Lister’s hip with his thumb digging in hard enough to almost hurt, and Rimmer’s breathing is wild, unsteady. Lister rolls back into his fingers, fast and steady, letting it fill him up, letting it press on his every nerve-end until it feels like his whole body is singing with it. “More, Rimmer, come on—”

“I can’t,” Rimmer says, and his voice cracks. “I’m—my hand’ll—break, or—”

“Then stretch—turn your fingers, just—” Lister’s words give out as Rimmer’s hand shifts and flexes, stretching, and Lister gives over to a long, low groan, a sound that rises from deep in his chest, and he braces a hand on Rimmer’s ribs. He can feel the muscles of Rimmer’s abdomen jumping beneath his skin, his whole body, and he wants to press him down into the mattress, to square away three million years of unfinished business and show Rimmer what good sex, proper sex, is really like. “God—Rimmer—”

He lifts up onto his knees, pulling his fingers free, and bringing Rimmer’s with him. He adjusts his position, straddling Rimmer. He’s impatient, can’t be bothered to be sexy about it—he spits in his hand, wraps that hand around Rimmer’s dick and pumps him roughly—Rimmer’s hands clench into the duvet covers while he makes a helpless whining sound in his throat—and then Lister gets a healthy dollop of Vaseline to smear over the head of Rimmer’s dick, and he positions himself over it.

Rimmer settles a hand, huge and warm and solid, over Lister’s hip; he guides him down.

Lister says, “Fuck,” drawing the word out long and slow, and he drops his chin into his chest, and he sinks down gradually onto Rimmer’s dick, lowering himself in incremental inches as Rimmer shifts his hips minutely to help him. Jesus. Lister forgot what it was like—the burn, the ache of it, the surreal sense of being full to his throat so that he can barely breathe or speak. Rimmer’s hand is still tight on his hip, and he looks like he might have just blacked out.

For a long moment, Lister doesn’t move, just breathing, just adjusting to it. His knees grip Rimmer’s sides. He clenches Rimmer’s hips in both hands, and he breathes through his nose in deep, slow breaths as he acclimatises.

Then, with his voice nearly strung to snapping point, Rimmer rasps, “Please—”

Lister lifts himself up and then rolls back, a slow roll that pushes Rimmer deeper, and Rimmer makes a helpless moan, his fingernails digging into Lister’s hip. Again—and again. Lister’s hips snap forwards at the same moment as Rimmer’s hips lift into him and— “Fuck,” Lister bursts out, grabbing at Rimmer’s waist as white heat bursts through him, electric, and he wants to chase that feeling. 

Rimmer is sweating finely, his hair damp and curling around his ears, and he is breathing ragged, clinging to Lister’s hips like a lifeline. 

“More—come on,” Lister says, and Rimmer lifts his hips up to meet him, his breath coming in a burst, and it’s so good that Lister feels it in the back of his teeth. His thighs are burning already because God knows he’s unfit, but there is this pressure low in Lister’s body, a smouldering heat in his belly that builds and builds every time he rolls back onto Rimmer’s dick, and he wants to keep going, to give himself over to it.

“Yeah, like that,” he gasps again, snapping his hips forward hard against Rimmer, and, “Come on, more,” and then he plants his hands on Rimmer’s chest, pins him flat against the bed while he rides him into the mattress.

Rimmer’s breath cuts off with a strangled, needing noise, and his head tips back—and yeah, fine, he’s gorgeous like this, Lister isn’t going to lie, he’s gorgeous. The gleam of sweat on his skin, the long, lean lines of his body, his chest heaving; his mouth open and wet and pink and gasping, his big hands, fingers splayed wide—and surreally, although this is apparently the only aspect of Rimmer’s life where he is able to shut up, Lister wants to hear him.

His hands spread across Rimmer’s stomach, where he is pale and sweaty and soft around the hipbones in a way that he wasn’t when Lister last had sex with him, and he keeps on running his mouth off, panting, “Yes—more, more—” and then Rimmer thrusts up hard and Lister twats his head at maximum force on the top of the bunk.

Rimmer freezes.

Lister shakes himself. “Okay… less.”

Eyes wide, Rimmer lets go of Lister’s hips and he reaches up towards Lister’s head. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll live,” Lister says, rubbing at the back of his head, but then as he shifts his weight on Rimmer’s hips, he bumps the top of the bunk again and winces. “Okay, maybe this isn’t the best idea we’ve had.”

“I don’t think, when the Jupiter Mining Corporation designed how much head-room each bunk should have,” Rimmer says breathlessly, “that this is exactly what they had in mind.”

“I think you might be right on that one.”

Carefully, Lister lifts himself up and then drops heavily to sit between Rimmer’s spread thighs, reorganising his limbs. He reaches forwards then to find Rimmer’s hands, and he tugs him upright.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Rimmer asks as he shifts to kneel in front of Lister, his head ducked to steer well clear of the top of the bunk, and he peers into Lister’s face. “I can’t have another sex-induced concussion on my conscience, I really can’t.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Lister says dismissively, flapping a hand, but Rimmer looks unconvinced, so he tilts Rimmer’s head up with a hand crooked under his chin, and he kisses him. He gets his other hand around the back of Rimmer’s neck, and he uses that grip to pull Rimmer down on top of him. “Come on, then,” he says, and curls his fingers through Rimmer’s hair. “I remember you in that AR game—show me made you’re made of.”

Rimmer gulps, and the nod he gives is shaky, his forehead butting against Lister’s. He hooks a hand underneath Lister’s thigh to haul it up by his hip, and his fingers tighten as he shifts, steels himself, and at last, pushes inside.

Lister’s back arches off the mattress as Rimmer slides home, and a slow, wordless sound rises in his throat along the edge of a sigh. He keeps one hand fisted into Rimmer’s hair, and with the other he palms his jaw and kisses him.

Rimmer’s breathing is wobbly, and he lets go of Lister’s thigh to brace both hands against the mattress either side of Lister’s head. Slowly, Rimmer rolls his hips forwards, and Lister’s mouth falls open to gasp against his. His thumb at the corner of Rimmer’s bottom lip drags his mouth open, and his tongue slips over Rimmer’s, the kiss slick, sloppy, heated.

Lister hooks his ankles together in the small of Rimmer’s back and Jesus, he’s not really bendy enough for this, but he ignores the burning in his quads because Rimmer thrusts in hard. A frantic, desperate sound rises in Lister’s throat and Jesus— _fuck_ —Lister wants him. He pushes his shoulders back into the mattress, lifts his hips into the next rock of Rimmer’s hips, and Rimmer fucks into him hard enough that he slides up the bed and all the air bursts out of Lister’s lungs.

“Like that,” Lister gasps, heat curling around the base of his spine, and he wants more, wants it all. “Yeah—come on, Rimmer, just like that, like you mean it.”

Rimmer’s mouth is open and panting against Lister’s jaw, every breath shuddering out of him like he’s coming apart, and Lister wants that too. He slides a hand down over Rimmer’s chest, works a thumb over his nipple, and Rimmer’s hips snap forwards hard. Lister rolls into it, and he can hear this sharp little noise rising in his chest, loud and totally beyond his own control, every time Rimmer fucks into him, and he’s so hard it hurts.

He can’t ignore it anymore, this searing need that has him groaning on the edge of every gasp like he can barely breathe. He wants to make this last as long as he can, but his thighs are shaking and not just from the exertion. Lister’s hand tightens in Rimmer’s hair enough to lift a helpless whimper in Rimmer’s throat, and Lister goes on goading him: “Come on, big man, fuck me, come on.”

Rimmer’s whole body shivers, and he drops his head to push his face into the crook of Lister’s neck with a moan that teeters close to being a sob. He’s shaking, sweat gleaming on his collarbone and his chest, and when Lister pitches his hips up into his next thrust, Rimmer’s arms give out.

He props himself up on his elbows either side of Lister’s head, and his body presses flush against Lister’s from chest to pelvis. Lister’s breath cuts out with a shallow groan, Rimmer somehow driving deeper now, his every thrust dragging against Lister’s dick trapped between their bodies, and Lister’s whole body taken over by the narrowing pound of blood, every muscle in his body tightening. “Oh—fuck, _fuck_ —Rimmer, I’m—”

“Lister,” Rimmer says, and Jesus, his voice is wrecked, strung out and hoarse and ragged. “Lister—please—please—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lister is nodding furiously, with only the flimsiest idea of what he’s agreeing to. Luckily, he and Rimmer seem to be on the same page, because Rimmer pushes his hand between them to fit his hand to Lister’s dick and he jacks him in quick, rough strokes that make Lister’s head spin. He’s close, slick enough that he fucks easily into Rimmer’s fist, and he can feel that their rhythm is breaking up into an unsteady stutter. His mouth is open on a low noise, and he gasps out, “Rimmer—fuck, Rimmer—”, unable to string together anything more coherent because he’s so fucking close—and then he comes hard.

He makes a sound he’s not proud of, long and low and drawn-out, grinding up against Rimmer in small, slow rolls of his hips—and the good thing, he guesses, about Rimmer’s frail sexual stamina is that it doesn’t take much more than that for him. It’s only a few moments of Rimmer gasping, a helpless whine snagged in the back of his throat, and then his breath cuts out. His hips jerk in uneven pulses and he follows Lister over the edge a second time.

Rimmer collapses, flopping heavily onto Lister’s chest.

Slowly, Lister catches his breath. He unhooks his legs from around Rimmer.

Rimmer’s eyes close, his cheek pillowed on Lister’s shoulder, and he lies there totally boneless and trembling.

After a moment, Lister pats Rimmer’s side. “Hey, don’t fall asleep on me again.”

“I’m not,” Rimmer croaks, eyes fluttering open, and he looks at Lister with an expression that is three-parts dazed to one-part like he’s thinking of proposing. “I’m just—waiting for the room to stop shaking.”

Lister’s hand on Rimmer’s side gentles, stroking down his ribs. “I don’t think it’s the room that’s shaking.”

“Ah.”

Carefully, Rimmer pulls out, and shifts enough to lie on the bunk beside Lister as best he can in the limited space—half-sprawled over one of Lister’s legs and partly on top of him. Before he can go too far, Lister gets a hand around the back of Rimmer’s neck and pulls him down to kiss him, deep and slow.

Pulling back, just far enough to fix Rimmer with a solemn look, Lister says, “I have something to tell you… but only in the knowledge that this goes no further than the two of us.”

Rimmer frowns. “What?”

Lister takes a deep breath, bracing himself. He props himself up on his elbow and drums his fingers on Rimmer’s chest as he tries to figure out how to word this—and how to live with himself in the inevitable aftermath. He says, “Rimmer, that was—that was… great, actually.”

Rimmer’s face lights up. “Really?”

“Really.”

Rimmer considers this. “Do you want to go again?”

Lister groans and flops back down. “I’m not you, man, I can’t. That’s me done for the day.”

This doesn’t seem to faze Rimmer in the slightest; he props his head on one folded arm, and he half-turns to face Lister. “Lister,” he says gravely, “I bet you twenty dollar-pounds I can get you going again.”

Damn it. Of course Lister’s competitive streak would be the death of him. “Twenty dollar-pounds and your poppadoms tomorrow.”

“Lister, be reasonable.”

With a grin, Lister rolls over to press himself against Rimmer’s side, and he pulls Rimmer into a kiss.

***

In the morning, nothing is really different. Down the stairs can be heard the sounds of Kryten clattering about in the kitchen; the mattress is a bit uncomfortable and there is a half-hearted ache in Lister’s lower back; there is the irregular whistle of Rimmer’s snoring; that dodgy warning light is still flashing orange on the far wall; there is the exotic mingled fragrance of flat lager and old stale socks. The only thing which is different is the arm slung round Lister’s waist, loose and heavy and warm, and Rimmer's body curled behind him.

Lister grins and wiggles backwards into him, pressing his arse blatantly against Rimmer where he’s half-hard, and gets a groggy sound mumbled into the back of his neck for his troubles, although Rimmer’s arm does subconsciously tighten around him. Lister gives it another go, and Rimmer mumbles, “What’re you playing at?”

“Me, sir? Nothing, sir,” Lister says innocently, still grinning from ear to ear.

“Lister,” Rimmer says around a yawn, “you have all the subtlety of an ABBA tribute band.”

At last, Lister gives in and he flips over to face Rimmer properly, tangling himself further in the duvet and kicking him in the shin in the process.

Rimmer barely reacts: he lifts his arm, without thinking, to let Lister turn under it, but otherwise he doesn’t stir. Eyes closed, cheek squashed, hair sticking up at the back, Rimmer looks fast asleep, but his fingers curl loosely in the small of Lister’s back, and after a moment, he mumbles, “Are you done wriggling about yet?”

“Oh, sorry,” Lister says. “Was I a bit of a fidget?”

“Fidget?” Rimmer cracks an eye open. “It was like trying to spoon a rotisserie chicken.”

“Smeg off.”

“I didn’t know whether to hold on or ask if you come with chips.”

“I wasn’t that bad,” Lister protests, as he moves in closer. His nose bumps Rimmer’s. “Besides, I didn’t take you for a cuddler.”

“I didn’t think I got much of a choice, going to bed with a limpet.”

“Alright, I’ll clear off, then.”

Rimmer makes a low grumble of protest. “Don’t do that.”

Lister kisses him, slow and sleepy, and Rimmer’s breath is musty and warm, but not totally unpleasant. He presses in closer to the warmth of Rimmer’s body, and each kiss is punctuated by long moments of stillness, half-awake, half-wanting. Lister’s fingers curl underneath Rimmer’s jaw, his thumb rubbing over the scar there, and Rimmer opens his mouth on a sigh. Everything is muted, sleepy, reduced to details—the lazy slide of Lister’s tongue, Rimmer kissing Lister’s lower lip, the low, exhaled sound that he makes into Lister’s mouth. Rimmer’s hand flattens on the small of Lister’s back and pulls him in, and Lister’s breath catches. He palms over Rimmer’s hip, drags him closer, and his dick, still not all the way hard but getting there, rubs in the crease of Rimmer's groin.

Rimmer makes a low humming noise in the back of his throat, like a moan he can't be bothered to make properly, and he pushes his knee between Lister's thighs. They slot together, easy, and it's a slow, lazy grind together, feet tangled, Lister's mouth open against Rimmer's as though to breathe in every hiccup of stifled sound that Rimmer makes when his dick drags against Lister's skin just right.

They rock together, Lister's tongue slipping over Rimmer's, the drag of his mouth down from the hinge of his jaw to press kisses against his collarbone, to suck at the slope of his shoulder and taste his skin. There’s none of the desperate urgency of last night, but rather a low simmering of heat that makes Lister sigh against Rimmer’s skin and chase his hips in slow rolls. 

Then there is a bang on the door.

Neither of them pay any attention to it. Rimmer hooks a hand around the back of Lister’s knee and pulls it up higher, near his hip; it pulls them flush together, makes it easier for Lister to thrust lazily against his hip. His hands slide down Rimmer’s body, dry palms skimming over his chest as he takes deep breaths, fingertips lifting goosebumps, and Rimmer’s hand on Lister’s back shifts down to grab a handful of his arse and pull him in closer again. Limbs tangled, chest-to-chest, Rimmer hard against Lister’s thigh, Lister against his hipbone, both of them too sleepy for anything more intense than this languid, unhurried fuck against the other’s skin. Rimmer’s eyes are closed. Lister feels like he could come or he could fall asleep, or both. One after the other, he reckons, as Rimmer lets out a soft, breathy noise and presses harder into him. In quick succession.

Someone bangs on the door again, louder and longer. “Hey!” It’s the Cat’s voice, unmistakably irritated. “Whatever you’re doing in there—and I do _not_ want to know—hurry up and get out, will ya?”

Rimmer rolls half-away, far enough that he can grope blindly on the floor behind him, and after a moment, he comes up with one of Lister’s boots, which he throws indiscriminately in the direction of the door. It hits the wall with a bang, pulls something down off Lister’s corkboard, and Lister huffs a laugh against Rimmer’s jaw.

“Oh, I’m not dealing with this,” the Cat’s disembodied voice says. “You monkeys are disgusting.”

Lister hauls Rimmer back in and kisses him. 

“There’s food downstairs,” the Cat says. “And I’m eating it all and I’m not waiting for you. And you’re on first pilot shift, Gerbilface!”

As the sound of the Cat’s footsteps down the stairs echo on the metal, Rimmer is seemingly trying to lick the roof of Lister’s mouth, and Lister is so stupidly, illogically, idiotically into him that he still thinks it’s hot, and he curls a hand into Rimmer’s hair as he grinds down against his thigh. That simmering heat is building to something keener, something sharper, curling around his spine, and when Rimmer captures his lower lip, Lister wants more, wants more of Rimmer’s mouth and his tongue and what he can do with them.

He tugs on Rimmer’s hair, just enough to clear breathing space between their mouths, and he asks, “Would you—”

That’s as far as he gets, and then Rimmer is shimmying clumsily down the mattress, hands grabbing at Lister’s hips and thighs. He sets about sucking him off with a fervour that Lister found all at once life-altering and deeply bewildering about six hours ago—although all his questions were pretty readily answered when Rimmer breathlessly pointed out, _to reiterate: I went to a boys’ boarding school_ —and every intelligent thought absolutely flies out of Lister’s head.

Everything narrows down to the wet heat of Rimmer’s mouth, the slide of his tongue along the underside of Lister’s dick, the stretch of his bruised lips. Lister keeps his hands in Rimmer’s hair and holds on tight, hips lifting to fuck into it—gently, because Rimmer’s enthusiastic but not all that skilled—and then harder, when Rimmer grips Lister’s hips tight enough to hurt. Lister’s only human, and he pushes his dick into Rimmer’s mouth with more urgency, his head spinning, and he tries not to make any noises which Rimmer might make fun of him for. Not that it ever works, because as soon as he starts getting close, Lister can hear that low groan rising in his chest every time he rolls forwards into Rimmer’s mouth, and it’s hard to care about that breathless noise of need he’s making because Rimmer looks obscene like this, and just like that Lister’s close. It’s so good, Rimmer’s shoulders rolling as he dips his head to take as much as he can handle, and the heat is snapping in Lister’s gut.

He has time to warn Rimmer, just about. “Oh—Rimmer—I’m—” he gasps, and then he comes in Rimmer’s mouth.

Rimmer coughs, but does his best. When he pulls off, a moment later, his mouth is pink and swollen, and he is breathing ragged, and Lister drags him up towards him to kiss him open-mouthed and bring him to the finish-line. Under his every touch, Rimmer is as responsive as a live wire, a hitched breath, a stammer of noise, the tightening of his fingers and the flexing of his hips. It doesn’t take long, pressing kisses to Rimmer’s throat and thumbing over his nipple, jacking him in short strokes to press under the head of his dick—because by this point, Lister feels like he should have a doctorate in making Rimmer come—and then, with a low, desperate sound and a shiver that runs the length of his spine, Rimmer is done. He comes over Lister’s stomach, and then sort of winces, over-sensitive, and Lister does feel kind of sorry for him: it’s been a long night.

Without further ado, Rimmer flops heavily down onto the mattress.

“Right,” he says, breathless, voice raspy. “We’re not having any more sex for at least a day.”

“God, what a hardship,” Lister says. “You’ll feel better by lunch-time.”

“No,” Rimmer says, shaking his head wildly. “I’ll die. Again.”

Lister grabs the corner of the duvet and uses it to roughly wipe his stomach clean, ignoring the way that Rimmer’s nose wrinkles distastefully. “I give you two hours, tops, before you’re pestering me for another shag.”

“Pestering? Sorry, remind me exactly which of us it was who climbed—”

“And aren’t you glad I did climb on top of you?” Lister points out. “Or would you rather we have stayed up all night wanking in separate bunks?”

Rimmer sniffs. “I don’t need to dignify that with an answer.”

“You’re right,” Lister says, dead-pan. “Stuff sex. I’m off to imagine having sex with you because I reckon it’ll be way more fulfilling than the real thing—”

“Oh, shut up.” Rimmer rolls over and kisses him to keep him from talking, and Lister thinks that he shouldn’t have let Rimmer onto that trick.

Then Rimmer climbs out of bed, stretches, bones cracking, and rakes a hand backwards through his hair. He stands up straight, lifts his chin and says briskly, “Dress.” In an instant, his clothes materialise on his body—blue quilted jacket neatly clasped, trousers hugging his slim thighs, boots polished to gleam.

“You jammy git,” Lister complains. “How come I can’t do that?”

“Just one of the perks of being dead,” Rimmer says glibly, seeming for too pleased with himself, and Lister rolls his eyes. Rimmer presses two fingers to his H, as though to check it’s still there, and then straightens his collar. “All okay?” he asks, arms out akimbo, turning smartly on his heel to face Lister.

Lister pulls a face, considering. The only thing that hasn’t been instantly, magically restored is his hair, which is, in the kindest possible terms, wrecked beyond repair. _Gravity-defiant_ wouldn’t do it justice. To say that it is glaringly obvious where whole fistfuls of curls have been used as handholds is an understatement. If you looked up _sex hair_ in an encyclopaedia, a picture of Rimmer would’ve been left out on the grounds of being too indecent. Even just looking at him, suited and booted and appearing faintly worried as he waits for Lister’s feedback, feels like a Rorschach inkblot test where the only answer is, _Rimmer sucking cock for four hours._

Lister lies, “Very presentable,” and flashes him two thumbs-up. “Good to go.”

They head down separately—Lister tries to drape himself artfully in a bedsheet toga out of laziness, but that is pretty swiftly vetoed by Rimmer, so he digs some half-clean long-johns out of his laundry pile instead, and then leaves Rimmer behind when he catches sight of himself in a mirror and panics.

“Morning, all,” Lister says cheerily, as he jogs down the steps to the breakfast table where the Cat and Kryten are already serving up, and he leans right over the Cat to grab a handful of toast slathered in butter. “God, I’m starving.”

The Cat and Kryten say nothing; they exchange silent, haunted glances.

Feeling totally ravenous, Lister heaps up his plate with the works—bacon, eggs, toast, sausage, more bacon, another egg, beans, a spoonful of leftover curry—and drops heavily into his seat to start eating just as Rimmer starts down the stairs.

There is an undeniable spring in his step as he comes down, smoothing both hands over his jacket, and the Cat gives Lister a flat, unreadable look just as Rimmer strides energetically to the table and declares, “Morning, chaps.”

He’s fixed his hair, at least, so there’s no physical evidence, even if every fibre of his being is like an endless loop of _I JUST HAD REALLY GOOD SEX_ bellowed over a megaphone. He actually slaps a good-natured hand to Kryten’s shoulder as he passes and says, “Looks like a good spread, Krytie me old chum,” and rubs his hands together gleefully before he sits down.

Lister hides his grin in his coffee.

Kryten, still in his apron and wielding a spatula much like Attila the Hun might have wielded a severed head, gestures to the food laid out on the table. “What can I offer you, Mr. Rimmer, sir? Can I interest you in a sausage?”

“No, thank you, Kryten,” Rimmer says easily.

“Oh! I didn’t mean to—I merely meant—” Kryten stammers. “I thought you might want to eat something to get your strength up and I know that often, in the mornings, you really like to get your teeth into some meat—oh no!” Kryten’s eyes widen, mortified. “Sir, I’m so sorry.”

It is taking all of Lister’s effort not to spit his coffee all across the table. Rimmer, to his credit, is taking it in his stride, and only gives Kryten a measured look. “It’s fine, Kryten,” he says. “What’s already here looks excellent.”

“Or I could—I could make something else,” Kryten says earnestly. “What about some nice mashed potatoes? I could whip up something like that—bangers and mash? Oh—sir!”

Lister snorts a laugh, slops coffee down his front, and has to stop himself from inhaling it and choking.

Rimmer’s smile is fixed in place, as though bolted on, and his eyes slide sideways to meet Lister’s as though begging for help. Lister shrugs helplessly, and at last, Rimmer looks down at his plate and takes a deep breath. “Just eggs on toast, please,” he says, and he reaches for his coffee.

As Kryten fills a plate, he starts to ramble about what has come up on the long-distance scanner—a couple of desolate planets, one gas giant (Lister cuts in, _Kryten, don’t be rude, Rimmer’s got a name_ ), and an asteroid belt—and the Cat tries to discreetly move as far away from Lister and Rimmer as possible. Rimmer compliments Kryten’s cooking, and Lister serves up seconds, then thirds, and absolutely no-one is talking about the elephant in the room, but every now and then Lister will meet Rimmer’s eyes across the table, strangely shy after Rimmer spent the whole night bending him into pretzels, and Rimmer will smile into his coffee.

Rimmer passes Lister the salt before he even asks for it, and Lister snags a rasher of bacon from Rimmer’s plate right in front of his eyes, and when Lister cracks some stupid joke at the Cat’s expense, Rimmer snorts a laugh, and Lister wants badly to kiss him even though he’s spent the last twelve hours doing exactly that. Of course, there’s still duties to go about afterwards, and the monotony of deep space still leaves a lot to be desired, but Rimmer passes a hand over the small of Lister’s back as he goes to take his shift at the helm, and if this is the new normal, then it could definitely be a lot worse.

***


	11. Boyfriend Material

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that originally I said this was going to be eleven chapters, but then the Powers That Be looked at this chapter during the editing process and was like "this is sixty-five pages, that's insane" so.
> 
> Extra chapter!

**XI**

In a relationship—with _Rimmer._ It boggles the mind. It defies all logic. Even now it evokes an instinctive, near-Pavlovian disgust response, even though Lister actually quite loves him, like eating chocolate cake out of a toilet bowl. _Eugh, Rimmer?_ It’s a knee-jerk reaction before his brain catches up. _God, why Rimmer?_ And then he actually remembers why, or he looks across at him and doesn’t need to.

As he half-sprawls on Rimmer’s bunk with a magazine, Lister tries to pick it apart and understand it, like a scientist analysing a germ under a microscope. All in all, it’s not really what Lister expected from a relationship… but then again, truthfully, Lister’s not entirely sure that it qualifies. For one thing, Rimmer still winds him up no end, and vice versa—only the other day, he tried to beat Lister to death with the microwave in response to his melodious rendition of _Walking On Sunshine._ They bicker, they argue, they unite in exasperated solidarity against Kryten and the Cat, but with the added bonus that now every night Lister crawls into the bottom bunk and inelegantly slumps on top of Rimmer to use him as a human pillow; that even though Rimmer still gives him crap for his morning breath and his sweaty armpits and farting in the night, when Rimmer complains he does it with his fingers curled loosely around the back of Lister’s neck, thumb rubbing a distracted, idle pattern behind Lister’s ear; that when Lister, half-awake and warm and groggy, mumbles, _not now, darlin’_ into the slope of Rimmer’s shoulder, Rimmer snorts a laugh but doesn’t make fun of him.

Rimmer goes on making Lister shit timetables and Lister goes on not following them, instead tacking them up on his wall like a deluded mum tacks up a crap drawing, and he lets Rimmer relentlessly nag him about it. What’s more, now that Lister has the incentive of sex to care about personal hygiene, he ups the ante of his personal maintenance regimen by going for a shower once a fortnight. If that’s not a relationship, Lister doesn’t know what is, but then again, Lister’s not exactly got masses of experience with what long-term looks like anyway. So... are him and Rimmer, like, committed? He’s not sure, but he recalls well enough how he took to the idea of Rimmer having sex with other people, so he reckons all signs point to exclusivity. Oh, God, do they have an anniversary? And if so, when the smeg is it? Lister can’t be dealing with getting shown up by Rimmer or he’ll never hear the end of it.

That said, there are some distinct advantages of this set-up as well. For example, he doesn’t need to worry about any of the boring, stressful parts of a burgeoning new relationship because Rimmer already knows him inside out. There’s no nasty surprises further down the line when the full extent of Lister’s slobbiness is unleashed, because Rimmer is painfully aware of it, and he’s hardly gonna get put off by Lister’s cheesy feet or his pick-and-flick habit or his reluctance to buy new underpants. Hell, as far as the fart barrier goes, Lister’s fairly certain that after suffering at the hands of Lister’s flatulence about twenty times a day for the last six years, there’s not much that he could do to shock Rimmer.

To put it to the test, Lister cocks his leg and lets one rip without warning—long and loud and squeaky and, as it becomes momentarily apparent, eye-wateringly putrid.

From the other end of the bunk where Rimmer is reading some boring crap about the Boer War, his knees pulled up and his socked feet tucked against Lister’s thigh, Rimmer doesn’t so much as blink. He just turns the page and goes on reading, and for a moment, Lister can only look at him, feeling a big, stupid smile spread across his face beyond his own control.

“Hey, Rimmer,” he says, and pokes him with his foot.

Rimmer doesn’t look up. “Mm?” He takes a deep breath in through his nose—he must smell it, surely he must do—but then he only scratches absently at the side of his nose and carries on reading.

Lister jabs him again with his big toe. “Rimmer. Oi—Rimmer.”

“What?” Rimmer lifts his head with a frown. Still no reaction, and Lister realises that actually he isn’t all that interested in provoking him into an argument about farting. After a moment, Rimmer’s frown deepens, and he closes his book over, his thumb tucked in to hold his page. “Lister— _what_?”

“D’you want a cuppa tea?” Lister asks.

Rimmer’s face softens. His free hand comes to rest on Lister’s ankle. “Do we have any biscuits open?”

“We should still have those bourbons kicking about if the Cat’s not nicked them.”

“Go on, then.”

Lister climbs out of the bottom bunk, and as he goes, he reaches out to ruffle Rimmer’s hair in a way that makes him pull his head away and grumble a complaint without any real anger in it, and Lister is still smiling as he makes his way to the kettle.

Relationship or not, Lister’ll take it as is.

Sure, it’s not perfect. Rimmer’s idea of whispering Lister sweet nothings seems to mostly consist of criticising his personal hygiene and calling him a rancid little turd, so they’re not exactly Romeo and Juliet, or Leo Dicaprio and the redhead who wouldn’t let him on the big floating door, but for Lister, he doesn’t feel as though anything is missing. He knows how Rimmer feels, even if Rimmer’s never said it—to be honest, Lister would be willing to bet hard money that Rimmer has never told anyone he loves them, ever, not even family. Scratch that—especially not family.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem that important. When they’re dodging asteroids and hastily patching up damage to the ship and trying to scrape together enough supplies from any derelict they pass, whether or not Rimmer has the courage to romance Lister in addition to kissing him and making him come and driving him mental doesn’t really register on the radar.

***

At the moment, Lister is irreparably deep into cocking up a game of Solitaire, while Kryten is wrapping up his shift at the helm, when the Cat comes leaping energetically down the stairs, embellished by a twirl and a scream and smoothing of the lapels. “Eyyy, what’s going on, grease-stains?” he exclaims. “Take a look, everybody. Take a good look and tell me what’s different.”

“I dunno,” Lister says.

The Cat looks over at him—and then past him, and then turns another circle, more slowly now, to scan the rest of the room. When he swivels back to face Lister, his expression is disgruntled. “You’re the only one here,” he complains. “Where the hell is everybody?”

Lister nods towards the cockpit as he turns a new card over. “Kryten’s on shift, dunno about Rimmer.”

“You mean I wasted that incredible, dynamic, show-stopping entrance on just _you_?”

Lister grimaces. “Fraid so.”

“I’m sure it was phenomenal, sir!” Kryten calls through from the cockpit.

The Cat huffs. 

“Is it… a new jacket?” Lister tries.

“Nope.”

“You’ve shined your shoes?”

“No way!”

“You’ve shined your…” Lister flounders, reaching out desperately for anything, “Hair?”

The Cat’s face breaks into a monumental grin. “You got it!” he cries, and spins again in delight. “Ooh, yeah! I’m trying out some new hair styling products,” he explains. “I’m all coiffed and ready to go, and this baby can hold every hair in place for hours!”

Lister has reached the end of the pack of cards, and he’s only half paying attention, but also he’s pretty sure this game of Solitaire is well beyond salvaging. “What’ve you done to it, then?” he asks the Cat as he squints at his options.

“Liquid nitrogen.”

Lister shakes his head. “Good luck with that. You on pilot shift now?”

The Cat heaves a sigh. “Tragically,” he says. “But someone’s gotta be the dramatic hero with rippling abs to save the day, so it might as well be me.”

Lister laughs as he watches him go, and turns his attention back to his cards, but the longer he looks, the more evident it is that he’s backed himself into a stupid corner. Goddamnit. 

He is just giving up, collecting the cards back into one pile, when Kryten comes down into the ship’s mid-section, looking as cheery and refreshed as someone with a rubber face can.

“Evening, sir,” Kryten says brightly. “Solitaire?”

“Yeah, but I’m packing it in. World’s crappest hand—got more queens than a gay bar.” Lister shuffles the deck in a few brisk, efficient moves. “You wanna play something?”

“I don’t wish to intrude, sir. If you want to play on your own—”

“Nah, you’re alright, it was getting boring. Rummy sound any good?”

Lister is just dealing out the cards when footsteps start down the metal steps from their quarters, and he glances up to see Rimmer coming down towards them.

“Heya, Rimmer,” he calls. “We’re playing Rummy, want me to deal you in?”

There is a beat where he doesn’t answer, and then: “Erm. No.”

Lister shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says, but then he looks over. Rimmer is unusually quiet—normally you can hear him complaining a mile off—and he looks almost grey, pale and clammy in a way that Lister hasn’t seen since he ate some bad oysters on planet-leave. “Are you alright?”

“What? Oh—no, I’m fine. Fine. I’m just—I was just—” Rimmer clears his throat. He comes and stands beside the table with his hands clasped together in the small of his back, standing like he’s at a military inspection. He gazes at a spot slightly above Lister’s head for a long moment before he goes on, “Just wanted to, erm, to borrow you, David—just for a moment?”

Lister physically recoils. He stares up at Rimmer, baffled. “What?”

“I was just wondering if—if—I could have a word with you, David.”

Lister scrutinises him, trying to work out if Rimmer’s body has someone been hijacked by an alien species, or if there’s some simulant death-ship listening to their every word and Rimmer’s trying to secretly communicate the current danger without giving himself away. He says, “What’s wrong with you?”

At last, Rimmer looks at him, a scowl curling across his face. “Nothing! Nothing is wrong, I just—I just want a word. Outside? Can we—can we just—please?”

Well, _please_ is definitely unusual. Lister’s eyebrows lift. “Alright,” he says, with a glance at Kryten that is in equal parts apologetic and deeply confused, and he sets down his hand of cards. He follows Rimmer out of _Starbug’_ s mid-section, down the narrow twisting corridors towards the lower deck. As Lister walks behind him, he realises why Rimmer had his hands behind his back—he can now see that Rimmer is squeezing his own fingers so tightly that he’s almost gone grey to the wrist, in an effort to keep them from jittering. It hasn’t worked, either. It looks like he’s trying to keep two small, very irate octopi from escaping.

They walk further down the stairs into the cargo bay, until Lister is thoroughly confused and has no idea what’s going on, and then at last, on the little metal walkway down towards the engine room, Rimmer stops. They’re not really anywhere, suspended between the upper and lower decks, with the orange glow of the heaters and water tanks below them, and for a moment, Rimmer just stands there awkwardly, saying nothing, doing nothing.

“So,” Lister says, clapping his hands together. “Right. How can I help then, _Arnold_?”

Rimmer unclasps his hands and he fiddles briefly with the railing beside him. “Well. Actually—David—”

“No way, we’re not doing this,” Lister interrupts. “Lister, dog-food-breath, goit, gimboid—let’s stick with those. And if you’re feeling really affectionate, like, what’s wrong with just plain old Dave? What’re you calling me smegging _David_ for? Makes me feel like I’m in trouble with the Headteacher, for smeg’s sake.” He hesitates, then, as something strikes him. “Am I in trouble?”

Some of the tension seeps from Rimmer’s shoulders. “No. No, I just—”

“Is this about the Urine Recyc unit? Because honestly, that wasn’t me, and the Cat will back me up on that if you ask him.”

“It’s nothing like that, I—”

“Also,” Lister cuts in, defensively, “I just want to add that the Urine Recyc was that colour even before the Cat and I were dicking around on the sanitation deck—”

“Lister—”

“—and anyway, I think it’s something that Kryten adds to it which even makes it flammable, so—”

“Lister, will you shut up?” Rimmer snaps.

Lister startles. “Sorry—yeah, alright.” He looks at Rimmer more closely now, illuminated as he is by the orange lights of the cargo decks below. “Are you… _sweating_?”

Rimmer’s glare turns murderous.

“Right, sorry, sorry.” Lister crosses himself and mimes zipping his lips closed. 

Rimmer takes a deep, steadying breath. His hand flexes on the railing at his side, and for a moment, he looks at that instead of at Lister. His throat works. “Well,” he says, and gets no further. His fingers stretch and curl. Drum rhythmically on the metal. His thumb rubs, distracted, over a rivet. “Well. I wanted to talk to you about—about what happened at Christmas.”

“Oh. Which bit?” Lister’s grin turns wicked. “If I remember rightly, it happened about six times that night.”

With a sigh, Rimmer looks at him. The hand on the railing becomes still. “Not that bit. I mean—yes, that, but mainly—erm.” He is struggling to maintain eye contact for longer than a few seconds. “I meant the bit where—when I was saying, you know, that Christmas wasn’t much fun when I was a child and no-one cared much about me,” Rimmer is picking up speed, his words running together, and he is looking somewhere near Lister’s shoulder, “and you said you did and I said you didn’t and you said you really did and I still didn’t believe you because I just didn’t think it was likely I mean let’s be honest you know what I’m talking about here I mean so and I dismissed it and thought you were being stupid and you got quite cross with me actually and—and—and—and—” Just like that, as Rimmer is working himself up into some kind of frenzy, he hits a wall and the last tenuous thread of what on Earth he’s on about finally breaks. “I was just—I was wondering if—well. I suppose I was wondering—I wanted to ask if—even though you’ve already said—wondering whether, actually—if you… meant that. Did you? Mean it, I mean. What you said. Did you really mean it?”

He looks at Lister, then, eyes wide and dark and faintly terrified, and Lister is really struggling to follow this conversation, but he gets that it’s important.

Lister frowns and tries to parse out what Rimmer is asking. “Wait,” he says, turning over the stammering mess of Rimmer’s crap speech. “You mean—do I love you? ‘Course I do, you git.”

Rimmer visibly relaxes. He swallows. He says, “Really?” and his voice is surprisingly small.

“God’s sake, Rimmer, what’s got into you?” Lister steps in closer. “Have you really been picking at that all this time? It’s been _weeks_ , man.”

“I know. But I just wanted to be completely sure, before…” Rimmer trails off, and he smooths a hand anxiously down the front of his jacket. He breathes in deep. “Look, I know I’m not very good at this. I’m sorry—just—hang on.” He pats down his side, fishes about in his pocket, and pulls out a sheet of folded paper, the creases worn thin from what Lister can only guess must be constant, relentless opening and refolding. When he flaps it open, Lister briefly sees reams and reams of Rimmer’s tiny, painfully neat handwriting, but then Rimmer only glances at it before he folds it away and nearly crushes it in his fist.

Lister says, “What—”

“I wanted to say,” Rimmer starts, his voice pitched weirdly loud for the space between them, “first of all, thank you. For—for everything.” He clears his throat, and he looks down at the partially crumpled paper in his hand. “I know I’m not… perfect.”

Lister tries his hardest not to laugh. However, when Rimmer looks up, there’s not much that Lister can do about his stupid smirk, and he only shrugs helplessly.

“No, I know,” Rimmer says. “I know. I know that I’m not… easy to be around, all the time.” He wets his lips nervously. His hands twist together, the paper forgotten collateral damage. “Easy to… like.” He looks at Lister, serious and scared and looking smaller than should be possible in a guy who’s got at least four inches on him. “Or—you know. To love. So. I wanted to say thank you—for trying.”

“I’m not trying, Rimmer,” Lister says, and he doesn’t know how to make Rimmer believe it. “I just do.”

“Wait, I haven’t finished.” Rimmer rubs a hand over his jaw. “There’s more. And I wrote it all down so that I would remember what to say but—honestly, a lot of it isn’t worth saying. A lot of tot about making me a better person—which is true, I think you have, but—sometimes I don’t necessarily want to be a better person. Sometimes I think—well. Is it not enough to be disciplined? To have a smart haircut? Why do I need to be good, as well? How other people feel—that’s none of my business. I don’t care if—if—they’re happy. I care if you’re happy, but—” Abruptly, he cuts himself off, and he looks into Lister’s face. There is surprise on his face, his mouth half-open, as though he didn’t quite mean to say that, but he rolls with it: he says it again. “I care if you’re happy.”

This time, when Lister feels a laugh tugging from within him, he lets it happen. It’s just a short huff of breath, his grin broad and gormless as ever. “Cheers, man,” he says. “Hey, can I get that in writing? ‘Cause that would come in handy every time you try to kill for me for playing my—”

“Stop interrupting, Lister, I’m not done,” Rimmer says. His voice is strained, thin. “I’ve been sitting on this for a long time and I’m not going to be derailed now, so you can just—wait your turn. Shut up and let me think.”

Lister holds both hands up in surrender. “Sorry, shutting up. Go ahead.”

Rimmer gives a curt nod, but he doesn’t say anything. He seems lost. He turns his folded sheet of paper over and over between his two hands. He half-opens it, for a moment, and then folds it and puts it back in his pocket. Breathing deep, he looks over at what lies beyond the walkway, the drop to the cargo deck below, and Lister has a not-inconsiderable concern that Rimmer might be about to throw himself off.

The orange strip-lighting casts his face in a warm light, makes him look soft and comforting and steady, even as his hands curl reflexively into fists at his sides—even as Rimmer looks increasingly like he might be sick. The longer that Rimmer stays silent, the increasingly apprehensive Lister gets, until at last, he tentatively asks, “Is this the version you wrote down?”

“Lister—”

“I just think it might be easier if you go back to your notes, is all I’m—”

Rimmer rushes out, “I love you, Lister.”

Lister blinks.

Rimmer lifts his head, and Lister looks into his face, and he has to admit it, for a moment he’s waiting for the punchline. He reads Rimmer’s expression—anxious, open, sincere—and, at last, it sinks in.

“I love you,” Rimmer says again.

Slowly, Lister feels his face light up, a smile pulling at his face that he couldn’t batten down if he wanted to, so wide it hurts. He says, “Oh, ey?” and that’s all he manages because he feels like all the words in his head are fizzling out into static, into an endless loop of _Rimmer loves him._ Over and over— _Rimmer loves him._

“Is that okay?” Rimmer asks warily.

Lister doesn’t bother answering that. He grabs the front of Rimmer’s jacket in both hands, pulls him down, and kisses him. Rimmer makes a little muffled noise of surprise, but it doesn’t take him long to get on board; he gets one hand round the back of Lister’s neck and the other in the small of his back to pull him in closer. The kiss doesn’t go much further, though, because Lister keeps grinning and Rimmer keeps getting a load of his teeth, and it’s distinctly not sexy but Lister feels lit up with it.

“Oh, Rimmer,” Lister says, pulling back and holding him at arms’ length. With an effort, he composes his face into something solemn. “Sorry—there is just one thing we do have to talk about.”

The look that flashes across Rimmer’s face is like a royal smorgasbord of a hundred different worries. “What?”

“Well, this may be hard for you to hear,” Lister says gravely, “but… I’m afraid you’re gonna have to hand over your Love Celibacy Society membership.”

Rimmer’s relief is palpable. “Oh, shut up.”

“Please turn in your badge and inflatable sex toys—”

“Piss off, smeg-breath.”

“Oh, yeah—talk dirty to me, _Arnold_ —”

Rimmer pulls him in again and soon shuts him up with a kiss that makes Lister’s toes curl, and he loops both arms round Rimmer’s neck, pushes up onto tiptoes to press in closer until he can feel him everywhere. He kisses Rimmer breathless, kisses him stupid, and then there is the deafening sound of an explosion.

The impact nearly throws Lister off his feet, and it’s only a knee-jerk handful of the front of Rimmer’s jacket that keeps him from toppling over. They go staggering together as the metal walkway rattles dangerously, and one of Rimmer’s hands comes up to clutch at Lister’s sleeve.

"Would it be too much to ask for five minutes without something trying to kill us?” Rimmer despairs, but then a second explosion rocks the lower decks, and there’s no time for whinging because things are seriously heating up.

“Whatever’s going on, it’s getting worse,” Lister says, yanking at Rimmer’s jacket. “We’ve gotta go find the others!”

“Right, well, what are we waiting for?” Rimmer exclaims, and he leads the way back up the stairs, two steps at a time.

Up on the main deck, everything is lit up with sirens and smoke.

“What on Titan is going on?” Rimmer demands as he stalks up into the cockpit, where Kryten is busy wrestling with a fire extinguisher and the Cat is steering them through what looks like an asteroid belt made entirely out of blue cheese. “It’s like a Glaswegian disco in here!”

“Welcome back, sirs!” Kryten calls cheerily. “We seem to have stumbled into a highly corrosive gas belt which is eating away at the hull of _Starbug_ even as we speak—but how are you doing?”

That information catches Lister off-guard. “What, so as soon as the hull goes, we’re getting turned into corned beef?”

“Not quite,” Kryten says. “Mushier—think applesauce, or puréed baby food.”

Rimmer gulps back a sort of squeak, and for once, Lister is with him on that verdict. It’s all hands on deck now—it takes nearly all the Cat’s strength just to keep them mostly going in a straight line, and Lister watches the damage report machine in open horror as it lights up in increasingly urgent colours as it identifies one engine fire after another.

“Can we turn back?” Lister asks, jumping into the copilot’s seat to lend a hand.

“According to the scanner, it’ll take ten minutes to exit the gas belt on our current trajectory, and nearly thirty to try and turn around,” Kryten says. “However, neither of that matters a great deal given that we have about six minutes before the engine core blows and incinerates us all.”

“Someone take over steering so I can slip into the right outfit for the occasion,” the Cat says. “I’m thinking a body-bag with sequin detailing.”

“Can we not cool down the engine?” Rimmer asks. “Or slow the gas down? We could throw some of Lister’s old underpants at it, that would stop anything dead in its tracks.”

“What about the Cat’s hairspray?” Lister wheels round to face the Cat in the pilot’s seat. “Liquid nitrogen—you said it yourself, it’ll freeze anything dead.”

“No way! It’s madness, it’s insanity—it’s a crime against humanity!” the Cat cries. “Imagine the frizz!”

“Look, Cat, we’ve got to.”

“Please, I’m begging you. Don’t make me sacrifice this—it isn’t worth it. Can’t you use something we don’t need—like Footface over there.”

Rimmer balks, indignant.

“No can do,” Lister tells him. “But think of it this way—if the ship comes apart and we all die in an agonising inferno, I reckon your hair will get a little crunchy anyway.” He stands up, bracing a hand against the back of the Cat’s seat to lean threateningly over him. “Now where’s the spray?”

The Cat moans in despair. “In my quarters. A pink canister. But—be gentle with her. Please.”

“Rimmer, take the controls,” Lister says, and slaps a hand to the Cat’s shoulder. “Kryten, come with me.”

“Hey—” Rimmer says, and he catches Lister’s elbow to hold him there. “Look—be careful.”

“Yeah, I will.”

“I mean it, Lister,” Rimmer says sharply. “Don’t do anything stupid.” His face is pinched with worry, although that in itself isn’t any different to usual—after all, he’s always a nervous wreck—but his hand is tight on Lister’s arm, and Lister wants to stop him looking so petrified.

“Yeah,” Lister says again, more softly. “I will.” He pulls away then, grabs Kryten, and hauls him out in search of hairspray. 

They sprint together back to the Cat’s quarters and ransack the towering heap of beauty products. The ensuing landslide of depilatory creams, facial toners, and charcoal masks nearly sweeps Kryten out into the corridor, but Lister knows what he’s looking for, and he holds his ground long enough to snatch at the neon canister as it comes tumbling down.

“How much time do we have?” Lister asks as he runs back to Kryten and they hurry down to the lower decks at high speed, Kryten clanking with every step.

“Four minutes, sir!”

Another flight of stairs down to the waste disposal unit, then one more to the engine room, and long before they reach it, Lister’s skin is prickling with sweat, the heat almost unbearable.

Then at last, they come to the fuel core in the engine room, and they both stop dead.

“This is gonna be like putting a plaster on a tumour,” Lister says.

He was envisioning a nice crack of the wall of the engine room, something he could neatly paper over with a fine coating of liquid nitrogen, job done. This, though… this is worse. The entire way down the room, floor to ceiling, the wall is bubbling like a baking tray of unsupervised gravy, and every now and then, small pockets of melting metal burst and splatter with a life-endangering sizzle. Lister looks down at the Cat’s can of liquid nitrogen hairspray, a canister so small it’d make it through Easyjet security without raising an alarm, and thinks that this might not quite cut it.

All things considered, Lister summarises the situation by simply saying, “Well, smeg.”

“Shall I engage my Sombre Acceptance of Imminent Death protocol?” Kryten asks.

Lister shakes his head. “Not yet. Just gimme a second—I’ll use my brain, I’ll think of something.”

“Oh, but sir, you’re so out of practice!” Kryten wails.

“Flood the engine,” Lister says with a snap of his fingers. “Open the water tanks—all of ‘em.”

“Of course!” Kryten exclaims. “The engine core’s failsafe would switch all primary functions and start immediate cooldown.”

“And we can use the Cat’s hairspray on the walls of the core rather than the hull to keep it cold longer.”

They work quickly, while Kryten calls out regular timings— _three minutes, sir_!—and Lister’s hands are slippery with sweat as he fumbles to finish the job. At last, the can fizzles out air, and Lister tosses it to the ground on his way back to the stairs. Then he pauses on the bottom step, a hand on each banister.

“Wait! Someone needs to open the tanks.”

“We can do it from the cockpit,” Kryten shouts over the steadily increasing noise.

“There might not be enough time!” Lister shouts back. “You go! I’ll—”

“Sir, if the hull ruptures before you can—”

Lister already has the excuses formulated in his mouth— _better one of him that all of them, he’ll be quick, he doesn’t mind the risk_ —but he hasn’t got so much as a syllable out when all those justifications are being drowned out by Rimmer’s voice in his head.

_Be careful. I mean it. Don’t do anything stupid._

Smeg.

Lister screws up his face as he fights with himself—his own faultless internal monologue versus a promise to Rimmer, which should be no contest but… God, if he gets himself killed doing this, he’ll never hear the end of it. Goddamnit. “Go, go!” he yells at Kryten as they go sprinting back up the stairs.

Kryten slams the blast doors shut behind them as they go, and Lister rushes ahead, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste, and he bursts into the ship’s mid-section and shouts, “Flood the engine! Now!”

Rimmer looks round wildly. “What?!”

“ _Now_ , Rimmer!”

With a somewhat impressive degree of blind trust, Rimmer does as he’s told.

There is a shipwide groaning sound, the whole ship veers wildly to one side so that Lister goes sliding into the dining table, the Cat starts screeching as he fights the controls, and Kryten battles up the last few steps and shuts the blast door at his back. Not a moment too soon, either. There is a low mechanical hiss, and the ship goes black and silent. It only lasts a moment before emergency power kicks in with a low hum, the dim lighting strips flickering over their faces. Lister can feel when the hull ruptures—his ears pop and there is a strange echoing creak below them—but the engine doesn’t explode and they don’t die, and gradually _Starbug_ rights itself.

Kryten’s head is faintly smoking; Rimmer, when he comes staggering out of the cockpit, looks not far off it.

“What’s happening?” Rimmer demands breathlessly, clinging to the door-frame. “Call me old-fashioned, but I was always under the impression that a functional engine was fairly essential to space travel, no?”

“And now we’re floating dead in the water,” Lister mutters. “I know. But we’re still alive, so—one-nil to Lister.”

“Now what?”

“Well, we have enough momentum that we’ll keep going, but we have minimal fuel and oxygen with the engines dead. We’ll be out of the gas belt in a few minutes and then we’ll need to plot a course for the nearest S3 planet to make repairs.”

Lister nods. “Cat, how are we looking?”

“Like a frizzy mess,” the Cat sniffs. “I hope sacrificing my hair was worth it!”

“Are you alright?” Rimmer asks, startling Lister out of his reverie.

He looks over at Rimmer and all his pent-up, adrenaline-fuelled aggro just sort of drains away, and he sags against the dining table. “Aw, you’d have been dead proud of me,” he says. “I was really sensible.”

Rimmer grimaces, but he does also step in closer. “If deliberately destroying the engine room is you being careful, I’d hate to see the alternative.” His fingertips drift along the seam of Lister’s sleeve and then fall away.

Lister nods at him. “How’re you gonna fare on the back-up generators?”

Rimmer’s face scrunches into a contemptuous frown. “I’ll have to go soft-light for a bit to conserve power, but I should be fine.”

Lister pulls a face, but he doesn’t want to kick up a fuss when Rimmer’s the one faced with getting switched off. “Fair play.” He reckons the others’ll make fun of him if he gets too soppy with Rimmer now, but he reaches out just quickly to squeeze his hand. Rimmer’s palm is slightly damp, his fingers cold and clammy, but that’s fine because Lister still fancies him. “Go on, then.”

While Lister watches, Rimmer reaches into the centre of his own chest—flickering unsteadily as he does—to change the settings on his light-bee. Just for a moment, he vanishes, and then when he materialises, it’s like the old days. Tall, handsome, sweaty, untouchable. Lister reaches up and flicks him through the H, grinning when Rimmer instinctively flinches, and he heads into the cockpit to help however he can with the mess he’s got them into.

For once their luck holds out—there’s a nearby S3 planet less than two days away, and so they make a beeline for it before the rest of _Starbug_ falls apart around them.

***

They make planetfall within good time, although it turns out to be less planet, more ocean, and they waste a chunk of their valuable power trying to find somewhere to land while _Starbug_ fights off storm winds that make Lister’s fillings rattle in his teeth. At last, they see lights in the distance, and bear towards what looks like some kind of drilling station. It’s a tall, metallic structure that sinks down into a rocky outcropping, and then further down into the water below; it looks neglected, largely abandoned, but it’s stable enough for them to touch down, and then it’s up to Lister and the Cat—reluctantly, as the only ones who are waterproof—to go out and try to patch things up.

To say _Starbug_ is looking bad would be a colossal understatement; the hull is a wreck, steaming and leaking and fizzing with sparks, but at least they can mount a few of their travel-sized wind turbines to keep them going during the repairs, and at least they’re in no risk of dying in a massive fireball anytime soon.

They get repairs underway as quickly as possible, stripping the damaged panels and releasing a torrent of toxic engine room floodwater which nearly sweeps the Cat away. Luckily, it turns out that there’s only one panel which is totally bust—it’s one where they took heavy fire from some GELFs a few years ago, and while they patched it, clearly the gas ate through the patch much faster than the rest of it. Lister hefts a crowbar in one hand and gets to work.

After a few hours, Lister is damp through to his pants, but the storm has settled somewhat, the rocking of the drilling station slightly less nauseating, and Rimmer comes out to make a nuisance of himself.

“How’s it going in there?” Lister asks as he pries the last panel off and steps back to let it clatter to the ground and land face down in a puddle.

“You know when you come out from your yearly shower and you leave a thin film of slime all over the floor?” Rimmer asks. “It’s like that.”

Lister looks over with a grimace. “I bet you’re loving it.”

In hard-light, Rimmer is down to a black undershirt, sleeves rolled up past the elbows to clear aninch of dead ground between his clothes and the bright rubber marigolds he’s sporting. He rolls his eyes. “I’ve had more enjoyable wisdom tooth extractions.”

“Good look, though,” Lister says, and he reaches out to ping one of Rimmer’s braces.

“Ow,” Rimmer says feebly. “Anyway, how come you get to do all the cool, tough, manly stuff? You’re stripping down spaceship parts and I’m stuck mopping up oil like the long-suffering wife of a chip-shop fryer.”

“I mean, let’s be honest here,” Lister says. “You didn’t do all that much repair work during your stint as technician, did you, Rimmer?”

Rimmer pulls a face. “No,” he admits. “Then again, I didn’t do all that much cleaning either.”

Lister shakes his head. “Chuck me a spanner?”

Rimmer passes one over, and then when Lister is struggling to line up the rivets, he reaches out to pin the panel carefully in place and hold it still, before Lister even thinks to ask. “Has anyone gone down into the station yet?” he asks conversationally as Lister tightens the rivets.

“Not sure, but we should have a look before we finish up here. There’s bound to be something valuable here for us to nick.”

“Anything not nailed down, for example.”

Lister grins. “That’s the spirit.”

They work until it gets dark, and by that point the hull at least isn’t leaking rainwater anymore, but there’s still no power. Kryten makes cold sandwiches, the Cat has to work by candlelight to get the liquid nitrogen out of his hair, and much to Lister’s annoyance, Rimmer goes back to soft-light. That night, Lister sleeps with his arm through Rimmer’s chest and a knee through his crotch, just like the old days, and the next day, they get enough of _Starbug_ repaired by noon that they’re able to tool up and head down into the station in search of an electrical port to charge the ship’s back-up generator, and also any movies that don’t star Julia Roberts.

As it turns out, the station is abandoned, mostly dark, illuminated only by fluorescent lighting strips near the floor and by the faint glow that Rimmer emits; intermittently, Kryten’s scanner beeps as it searches for any life-signs, but so far it’s coming up empty.

Down another flight of stairs, they come into a much wider, more open space, yawning like a black hole before them—and then, with a flicker and a hum, the lights come on.

Lister blinks, momentarily blinded by the glare; Rimmer takes a nervous step back behind Lister, even though he’s more or less untouchable.

The Cat hisses and spins wildly. “Who’s there?” he exclaims, trying to make himself look bigger. “I’m ready. I won’t be caught unawares, you watch!”

“Technically, sir, you already have,” Kryten points out, and the Cat only hisses louder.

One by one, the overhead lights stretch back to reveal an enormous, mostly empty room, and then, at the heart of it, an enormous energy core, a massive twist of black rock slowly spinning like overcooked pasta, glowing faintly orange through a series of thin cracks in its surface. It doesn’t seem to give off any heat, though—on the contrary, it seems to be sucking the heat from the room.

“What on Io is that?” Rimmer demands.

Before Kryten can get a word out, an enormous projection of a woman’s face materialises in front of them, approximately the size of a car, but better-looking. Dark-haired, long eyelashes, lipstick that could probably glow in the dark. In a bored voice, she says, “It’s a Perpetralithium core. More importantly, though, who are you?”

The four of them exchange bewildered glances, so thrown off by this latest development that for a moment it’s like they all just forget their own names.

At last, Lister steps in. “I’m Lister, hi. This is Kryten, Rimmer, and the Cat. Sorry to barge in, but our ship was close to exploding so we had to bail out quick to repair.”

“So you just thought you’d stop here, did you?” she says coldly.

“Well, I mean—yeah, actually,” Lister says. “Like I said, we were close to exploding. We would’ve stopped anywhere we saw. Hell, we probably would’ve even stopped at a Little Chef.”

“Now, Lister, we weren’t _that_ desperate,” Rimmer says.

“We’re just here to repair our ship and then we’ll be on our way,” Kryten says.

“Bull,” the AI says. “You were here to steal from me. Do you think I was programmed yesterday?”

The four exchange glances again.

“No,” Rimmer says, scandalised. “Never.”

“Never, no way,” Lister says.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

The AI’s eyes narrow. “Then what are the big holdalls and crowbars for?”

“Ah,” Rimmer says. “Glad you asked. See, we—”

“They’re for stealing things!” the Cat says, beaming.

Lister closes his eyes in agony.

Kryten turns to the Cat. “Sir,” he says mildly, “may I recommend, with the humblest respect, that you stop talking immediately?”

The AI looks less than impressed, one eyebrow cocked as she glares down at them all. “Thieves _and_ liars, the lot of you,” she surmises bluntly. “Anything else? Mass-murder, perhaps?”

At Lister’s side, Rimmer shifts his weight nervously from one foot to the other. Lister leans over and hisses, “Don’t.”

“Please forgive us,” Kryten says. “We didn’t mean to cause any offence—we believed the station was abandoned.”

“It is abandoned,” the AI says. “That doesn’t mean that you can do what you like with it. My crew will be returning soon, and what am I going to say— _oh, sorry, folks, just let a couple of random stragglers help themselves to all our equipment and supplies_! That’s gonna go down well, isn’t it?”

“Wait—so where have your crew gone?” Lister asks.

“The Perpetralithium is too volatile for interstellar transport, but it’s too valuable just to give up on the extraction project,” the AI explains proudly. “The crew left to find a more reliable method of transportation for the fuel. Six-thousand three-hundred and eighty-nine years ago, the station became self-sufficient—we now have enough Perpetralithium to be able to automate the drilling process, and so the station remains active until the crew returns.”

“Sorry, how many years ago did you say?” Rimmer asks.

“Six-thousand years,” Lister repeats. “I dunno how to tell you this, but I don’t think—”

Kryten elbows him sharply.

“—that you should give up hope,” Lister says solemnly, changing tack without so much as flinching. “They will be back any day now, I’m sure.”

“Any day now?” the Cat echoes. “Togas and knee-high sandals will be coming back before they—”

Lister elbows him sharply.

“—forsake you,” the Cat finishes. “You will not be forgotten.”

“Please forgive us for the offence of breaking in,” Kryten says. “All we need is to borrow some power to charge our generators, and time to complete our repairs.”

“If I allow it,” the AI says.

“If,” Kryten repeats worriedly, “you allow it… yes.”

“But why should I?” she asks, and she runs her tongue over her teeth like she’s trying to remove a lipstick stain. “I mean, what’s in it for me?”

“A warm fuzzy feeling,” the Cat says.

“You can go on a date with the universe’s greatest lover,” Lister says easily, drawing himself up tall and proper. “Arnold Judas Rimmer.”

Rimmer sort of chokes on his own spit. “What?!”

“Now, I know the ears are off-putting,” Lister goes on, holding up both hands placatingly, “but bear with me. He’s tall—nearly six foot, aren’t you, Arnie?—and he’s very organised, very ambitious, he’s always got a pen… Plus he’s got an absolutely staggering collection of stamps, you’ll love it—”

The AI looks increasingly repulsed the longer that Lister goes on talking, and Rimmer is slowly turning purple.

“—not to mention he can do this thing with his tongue where—”

All three of them cut him off by squawking _LISTER!_ at the same moment, and Lister ducks away with a grin as the Cat tries to hit him in the face.

“Shut up,” the AI snaps. “All of you, just—shut up. God. Fine. Alright. I’ll allow you to recharge but that’s all. And I want you off my station within three days, is that clear?”

“Crystal, ma’am,” Kryten says, and Lister twirls off his stupidest impersonation of Rimmer’s JMC salute and slaps himself in the forehead.

“Oh, just one last thing,” Rimmer says as they turn to leave, and he holds up a finger to pause them in their tracks. He turns back to the AI. “So—was that dinner and a movie you were after, or shall we just skip those boring bits and go straight back to your place?”

Kryten bursts out, “Oh, I can’t take you anywhere!” and he grabs Lister by the arm to start hauling him bodily away while the Cat hoots with laughter, and Rimmer, in soft-light, dutifully follows.

Being allowed to draw from the station’s power makes everything much faster—they switch Rimmer permanently back to hard-light, they can start the water tanks drawing up and filtering seawater, and Lister finds some small service robots that he bribes into helping to repair _Starbug’s_ hull. The only downside is that now that AI—Courtney, as it turns out— follows them around, being as hostile and arsey as ever.

“I thought you wanted to leave this moon at some point,” she remarks, dripping with sarcasm. “You might need to put some more elbow grease into it.”

“How dare you,” the Cat retorts. “I don’t religiously follow a thirty-step cleansing regimen to be accused of being greasy by a woman with pores so defined you could go ice-fishing in them.”

Courtney snipes at Kryten, sneers at Rimmer, and Lister is doing a good job of trying not to let it get to him, but she is driving him mental—and what’s worse, he is under strict instructions from the others not to deliberately antagonise her, so life at the minute just doesn’t feel worth living.

Every day they go back down to the universe’s meanest AI, to promise that they aren’t gonna nick anything, that they’ll be out of her pixelated hair soon, and on occasion to beg permission to venture deeper into the station in search of a different screwdriver head or a spare welding helmet. Today the four of them have headed back in to ask for two new acts of benevolence—an adaptor plug, and something called a B26 molecular shift-paddle—and Courtney looks back at them like they’ve asked for her placenta.

“Why?” she asks acidly.

“To make it the filling in a B26 molecular baguette,” Rimmer says. “Why d’you think?”

“Oh, you wanna take that tone with me, do you?” she challenges. “Pretty ballsy of someone whose survival relies entirely on my generosity.”

Rimmer inflates like an angry balloon. “Now, you listen here—”

“Mr. Rimmer, sir, no!”

“He’s very sorry,” Lister interrupts loudly, trying to drown out the sound of Rimmer’s teeth grinding. “We all are. Now, please—we just want to borrow them quickly, so we can finish our repairs and be off.”

Courtney pauses, considering this. “Say please.”

“I already did,” Lister says, and then backpedals frantically when he sees her face change. “I mean—please.”

“Pretty please,” the Cat says.

“Ma’am,” Kryten adds.

Rimmer is twitching with rage and says nothing, so naturally, she turns to look expectantly at him.

Lister touches a hand lightly to the small of Rimmer’s back in an attempt to mollify him, and so, with a vein pulsing in his temple, Rimmer forces out, “With a cherry on top.”

The all-clear given, they split up to get it done. Kryten and the Cat head down to the engine room to get the B26, while Rimmer and Lister wander helplessly around in search of an adaptor, which Courtney helpfully suggests will be _probably lying around somewhere_. Rimmer, of course, has plenty to say on that.

“She’s about as much use as a female lavatory in a golf tournament,” he mutters angrily as they head down the long, echoing halls. “I’ve seen viral infections that have been more helpful than that jumped-up old cow.”

Lister hums thoughtfully. “Shame. She’s not bad-looking otherwise.”

“Oh, of course, she’s your type,” Rimmer says, rolling his eyes. “Mean, non-human, hates you—when will you be getting down on one knee?”

“Doesn’t matter, anyway—she’s not interested, is she? She’s only got eyes for you,” Lister says with a smirk, and he bumps Rimmer with his hip.

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Rimmer says, totally missing the sarcasm, and he puffs his chest out. “You know, my mother used to say that my brothers and I were eye-catching specimens—”

“What, like taxidermy?”

“No, like… like our looks were somehow heightened by our bearing, our gravitas, our stoicism—”

“Your quivering nostrils,” Lister teases.

Rimmer scowls at him. “Hey, I’ll have you know that in the past, many girls admired my nose.”

“Yeah, they thought it was the Channel Tunnel.”

“Oh, piss off.”

“She was trying to give you a snog but she didn’t know whether she needed her passport.”

Rimmer huffs indignantly, but Lister snakes an arm around his waist before he can get himself worked up into a proper sulk, and he squeezes him tight round the middle, tight enough to make him grumble and squirm.

“Get off,” Rimmer complains with a melodramatic sniff. “You’ve made your feelings clear.”

“You’re not really cross,” Lister says, squeezing him tighter. “Are you? Go on, big man, give us a kiss.”

“No,” Rimmer says petulantly, although the tips of his ears are going pink.

“I’m only teasing ‘cause I’m jealous,” Lister says, pressing his thumb into the spot above Rimmer’s hip where he’s most ticklish, so that he jumps and yelps and folds into Lister’s side, “—and ‘cause you’re such an easy wind-up.”

“I am not an easy wind-up, thank you very much!”

“And ‘cause it drives me crazy,” Lister says, grinning as he turns to face Rimmer fully, his other arm coming up to twine round his neck so he sways in close to his face, “the way you flare up like an angry lizard—” Rimmer bristles, and does exactly that, “—and pull yourself up tall, so you look dead handsome—” A crease furrows between Rimmer’s eyebrows, and the more prim and haughty he gets, the more Lister wants to rile him up, and he slides a hand up into the back of his hair, “—and the way you go to putty when someone plays with your hair—” and Rimmer’s mouth parts on a shallow breath as he leans almost imperceptibly into the touch.

“You could give a masterclass in how to annoy the ever-loving smeg out of me,” Rimmer mutters, but his heart’s not in it, and at some point, perhaps without even noticing, his hands have found Lister’s hips.

Lister’s grin narrows. “I could give a masterclass in how to do a lot of things to you,” he says, voice low and smooth, as he curls his fingers into Rimmer’s hair with a gentle tug—not enough to hurt, but just enough that Rimmer’s chin lifts and the intent is clear.

Rimmer doesn’t quite whimper, but the sound that he makes as he reflexively swallows isn’t a hundred miles off it either. Lister cocks his eyebrows.

Rimmer clears his throat. “Such as?”

“Oh, don’t you worry,” Lister says, and he lets Rimmer go, dusts off his shoulder as though sweeping him for lint, mega casual. “Wouldn’t want to wind you up.”

Rimmer grabs Lister by the front of his boiler suit and yanks him in for a bruising kiss that nearly bends him over backwards—game, set, match. With a muffled laugh, Lister is straight on board, and he goes for a handful of Rimmer’s dick through his trousers. Rimmer’s breath hitches, and then he breaks away. He still has Lister’s clothes fisted in both hands, only now he uses that grip to haul him, stumbling, into a nearby supply cupboard.

It’s tiny, barely big enough for them both, littered with mops and old deactivated service robots that go clattering everywhere as soon as they come staggering in; Rimmer trips over a dustpan and brush, saved only by Lister snagging him by the elbow and steadying him. Then it’s back to Rimmer’s tongue in Lister’s mouth, Rimmer’s breath coming quick and hot and ragged, Lister’s hand working roughly at Rimmer’s clothes to try and find bare skin. Lister’s back bumps a shelf, sends a can of paint rolling over the edge and crashing to the ground, and there is something pressing uncomfortably into the back of his leg, but Lister’s hard-pressed to care much about it when Rimmer’s teeth drag over his lower lip in a way that makes heat snap in his gut.

Lister pushes a hand into the front of Rimmer’s pants, and Rimmer makes a sound that feels like it rattles through every bone in his body, lighting sparks and setting fires under Lister’s skin, and Lister is panting against his open mouth, stupidly fired up and thinking that it’s criminal how much he fancies him, how much he wants to peel Rimmer out of his clothes and make him shiver.

“Come on, darlin’,” he urges breathlessly as he palms over Rimmer’s dick, and then a massive, pixelated head materialises on the back of the cupboard door, because of course it smegging does.

“You know,” Courtney says, “when I said the adaptor could be anywhere, that isn’t the first place I expected you to look.”

Rimmer and Lister jerk apart, and instantly start shouting and throwing things at her head.

“—out of here, you creepy, insufferable—”

“—you want, you voyeuristic piece of smeg—”

“—start kicking off in a second—”

“—your rocks off somewhere else, you pervert—”

Throwing cans, brushes, sponges, anything they can get their hands on, Lister and Rimmer rally indignantly until she disappears, and then… just look at each other, bemused, half-dressed, and distinctly less raring to go than they were five minutes ago.

“Bollocks,” Rimmer says succinctly, planting his hands on his hips.

Lister doesn’t trust Courtney not to pop back in if he tries to kiss Rimmer again, so he doesn’t, no matter how much he wants to. Instead, he reaches out to straighten Rimmer’s collar, says simply, “I’m gonna kill her,” and heads out of the cupboard … only to come face-to-face with Kryten and the Cat.

Kryten’s eyes boggle. In the cupboard, Rimmer is still straightening his clothes.

“The hell have you two monkeys been playing at?” the Cat exclaims.

“Mopping up a puddle,” Rimmer says, at the exact same moment as Lister says, “Looking for a plug.”

The Cat makes a noise of disgust. “It’s like I accidentally bought a weekend pass for the sex-addled moron convention.”

Kryten’s eyes shift nervously. “Er, Mr. Rimmer, sir,” he says delicately. “I’m afraid your, er—your fly is unzipped.”

Rimmer goes red, and it takes all Lister’s willpower not to laugh at him.

It turns out that there was a spare adaptor plug in the engine room, anyway, and so they’re all set, and together they head straight back to _Starbug_ —or at least, almost.

As they traipse along a walkway towards the main staircase, Lister spots something that makes him veer wildly off to one side without warning, and before any kind of effort at impulse control can be felt, Lister rips it off the wall and nicks it.

Rimmer rounds on him, hissing, “What are you doing? I thought she was really strict about us _not_ stealing things!”

“I mean, yeah, but I’m sure she also probably didn’t want me to wank you off in a cupboard, but—hey. I’m a simple man with simple needs.” Lister then holds up what he’s taken and gleefully shows Rimmer: a metal sign, red with white lettering, which reads, PRIVATE—KEEP OUT. “D’you reckon this’ll give her the right idea?”

Rimmer smirks.

***


	12. Date Night Suits

**XII**

It’s Friday, seven PM—or whatever passes for it, since time in deep space is fairly arbitrary—and according to Lister’s timetable, it’s time for _courting Arnold._ There’s very little on that crap timetable that Lister actually adheres to, but he’s gotta admit, this one has become a habit. Do-over after do-over, time and time again, until they get it ‘right’, according to Rimmer, although what that actually means is anybody’s guess.

This time it’s something along the lines of dinner and a foosball tournament, hopefully followed by several hours of energetic sex afterwards, and for the occasion, Lister has scrounged together an old suit—blue pinstripes, with a yellow shirt only missing one button. He doesn’t look exactly immaculate, but Lister reckons it’s the thought that counts, even if the thought is ‘ _homeless man looking to sell his blazer for a six-pack of lager and a packet of fags’_. He meant to ask Kryten to give it a third dry-clean, but he forgot, and so instead he’s dabbed some scented antibacterial gel onto the sleeves as a kind of budget cologne. Lister has even given ironing a bit of a go, although admittedly not with any success. 

The only trouble now is that Lister’s lost his cravat down the back of his locker—the one Rimmer got him for Christmas, and not least of all it’s the only vaguely tied-shaped thing he owns—and so, naturally, it’s when he’s awkwardly half-stuck behind the locker, armpit-deep in dust-bunnies, when he hears the door open and footsteps come to a halt behind him.

“Are you—” Rimmer’s voice falters. “Are you wearing a _suit_ , Lister?”

“Yeah,” Lister says, somewhat muffled by being half behind a locker, still fishing for his cravat. “I got it off a body on that derelict we passed a while back. It had some unfortunate stains on it, but Kryten loves a challenge, and it doesn’t even smell anymore now that—aha!” At last he snags the slippery fabric of the cravat with his fingertips, and hooks it out with a triumphant flourish, like a magician with a rabbit. “Got it!” he declares, and at last turns around to face Rimmer. “Smegging hell,” he breathes around a laugh. “You look like an army wives’ kissogram.”

Standing in the doorway, looking faintly gobsmacked and also like a bit of a tit, is Rimmer, in his full, head-to-toe, spangly dress-uniform get-up. 

Actually, by far the worst part of this is that it’s still kind of doing it for Lister, the padded shoulders and single-breasted close fit only emphasising his stupidly tiny waist, the white trousers clinging to his narrow thighs. God, what gives anyone the right to look genuinely fit in the most ridiculous uniform in the world?

“What’s wrong with this?” Rimmer says defensively. “Anyway, you’re all toffed up to the nines as well—look at you!”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Lister says. “I look daft. I’ll just—stuff this cravat, shall I?” He holds it up, lets it dangle between his fingers.

“I didn’t say that,” Rimmer objects, with an expression that he would categorically deny as being pouting, and Lister takes pity on him, reels him in with a finger hooked through his gold braiding, and kisses the corner of his mouth. Rimmer takes a deep breath. “Steady on, Listy,” he says, taking the cravat from Lister’s hand, and he steps in to help him. “We want to make it to dinner, don’t we?”

Lister raises his eyebrows. “Speak for yourself, man.”

Shaking his head, Rimmer threads the cravat through Lister’s collar, over-under, pulling the knot smoothly through. Lister tips his chin up to allow Rimmer room to work, and he watches Rimmer’s face, the line between his eyebrows as he concentrates, his eyes on his hands, gaze darting briefly up to Lister’s mouth while he’s adjusting the fabric. Lister winks with his cheekiest grin alongside, and says, “Like what you see?”

“It’s what I’m smelling that’s more of a concern,” Rimmer says. “You’ve not brushed your teeth, have you?”

Lister’s face falls, but before he can falter, Rimmer chucks him gently under the chin and kisses him. It’s only a fleeting dry kiss that for some reason gets a flutter in Lister’s throat, a fizzing under his skin, and the only words he can find for it, when Rimmer pulls back, is some half-coherent insult about _your priorities all wrong, you pedantic dick_ , because anything else would come out all wrong.

Together they head down _Starbug_ ’s midsection, where Kryten has set up the table for them, before scarpering with the Cat on their salvage mission—on assurances that they would take at least two days to return. Lister had the foresight to check in with Kryten beforehand about any kind of decor, to ward off a misunderstanding like the lacey Laura Ashley bunk-room incident; as a result, it’s just the plain ship table, a tablecloth cast over it that might once have been blue but is now a sort of indiscriminate, overcast grey, with a battered copy of an old manual wedged under one wobbly table leg. 

Rimmer pulls out the chair nearest to him with a low, scraping bow, and blinks blankly at Lister when he sits down comfortably in the seat opposite. He looks down at the seat he’s pulled out, stares at it like he’s never seen a chair before, and then back at Lister. His mouth half-opens as though to speak, and nothing comes out.

“You alright?” Lister checks with a frown as he rolls his blazer’s sleeves up to the elbow, and Rimmer does sit then, although stiffly, still looking like he’s not sure how he got there. Lister gestures to him again with one hand. “You gonna lose the hat at any point?”

“Erm,” Rimmer says, “no.”

At Lister’s puzzled look, he relents and admits the truth with a sigh: he can’t.

“Why the smeg not?”

“I borrowed some hair gel from the Cat and it made everything much, much worse.”

Lister frowns. “How much worse?”

“Unimaginably, immeasurably worse,” Rimmer says gravely. “I’m doing you a favour, honestly.”

“Go on, give us a look, let’s see.”

Rimmer hesitates. “Maybe once you’ve had a few more drinks,” he hedges.

Lister lets out an ugly bark of laughter. “That bad? Jesus.”

Rimmer looks briefly embarrassed, but in a moment they’re both laughing, and they're laughing _with_ Rimmer, not at him, as he tries to find increasingly ridiculous points of comparison— _like trying to hide the Pyramids under a pillowcase_ —and then at some point it circles round to a silly argument about whether knowing which fork to use at a fancy restaurant is valuable skill—it is not, Lister argues, _because a fork is a fork, and if really pressed, what’s wrong with just using your hands_ —and then Rimmer spends too long trying to explain what a Michelin star is awarded for, and Lister is pretending to snore into the hand he’s propped his chin on.

“You know, I can’t believe you’re being so rude like this after I’ve made so much effort.”

“What effort?” Lister says incredulously, jerking back upright. “Walking downstairs?”

Rimmer starts to tick the list off his fingers. “Getting dressed up—”

“Your clothes are pre-programmed—you don’t even have to put them on!”

“I did something different with my hair—”

“Which is apparently such a disaster that you won’t even let me see it—”

“—and I was really going to splash out on dinner for you!”

Lister starts to laugh. “How? Kryten’s only cooked one thing.”

“Yes, but I was going to be the one to actually foot the bill—”

“It’s free, you twonk!” 

“Not to mention that I tried to pull your chair out for you,” Rimmer accuses, pointing at Lister across the table.

“Is that what you were doing? I thought you forgot how to sit down.”

Rimmer splutters incoherently. He tries to scowl but it’s not quite working, because his mouth is lifting in one corner into a smile that he can’t control. “I can’t believe this. I’m being really chivalrous here, and you’re—well—”

“Well?” Lister prompts.

“Well—”

“Well?”

“Not appreciating it!” Rimmer finishes feebly.

Lister pulls a face. “Aw, I’m sorry. I’ll be dead appreciative now—of your nice medals and your, I dunno, bouquets of flowers or—”

“I’m not getting you any smegging flowers,” Rimmer argues, and Lister throws his hands up in defeat.

From the galley kitchen, there comes the shrill beep announcing that food is ready, and Lister jerks his head over in its direction with a grin. “Go on, then, Prince Charming,” he says. “Hop to it. Sweep me off my feet.”

Rimmer huffs, but he does get up. He pauses in the doorway to the kitchen, one hand on the door-frame, and says, “Drink?” He glances over his shoulder. “Looks like there’s wine—”

“Lager,” Lister says.

“—a nice red, perhaps some rosé—”

“Lager, please, man,” Lister says.

“—or actually, I’m sure that there’s that old Chardonnay we found—”

“Rimmer,” Lister says flatly.

“Oh, alright,” Rimmer mutters as he retrieves the beers—but they’re posh ones, either way, nice bottled things with exotic labels from planets Lister’s never even been to. “Can you blame me for trying to refine your palate?”

“I don’t want a refined palate,” Lister says, watching with amusement as Rimmer retrieves the drinks. “I want my palate as coarse and tacky as possible.”

“Well, you’ve certainly succeeded at that.” Rimmer fumbles with the bottle, and realises too late that it’s not a screw-top when he hurts his hand on the sharp edges. He winces, rubs his hand on his thigh, and glances around helplessly. “Have you—is there a bottle opener anywhere, or—”

Lister holds out a hand for the bottle. “Nah, you’re alright, I can do it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rimmer says, and tries again with his hand, his face crumpling in pain as he does. “I just need to—to—”

“Rimmer, I can—”

“Hang on, let me—” Rimmer’s hand slips, and he swears under his breath, flexing his fingers where he scored the metal across.

“Give it here.” Without waiting, Lister takes the bottle out of Rimmer’s hand, cracks it open with his teeth, and spits the lid across the room, where it clinks against the floor.

Rimmer blinks at him. “You could break your teeth doing that,” he says faintly.

“You’re crap at being chivalrous,” Lister tells him, but his voice is gentler than it would be if he was properly telling Rimmer off, because there’s something oddly sweet about it, Rimmer’s hopeless, grumpy attempts at being a gentleman. “But—thanks.”

Rimmer does look somewhat pacified by that, and so he doubles back to the kitchen for the food. He returns a moment later, laden with an enormous silver platter.

“For your main course, monsieur,” Rimmer says, in his most nasal, kiss-arse voice—the one that Lister absolutely hates, except when it’s directed at him, somehow it’s not odious, it’s kind of a laugh—and Rimmer removes the lid with a dramatic flourish and a billowing cloud of steam, “I present to you… erm.”

They both peer at the contents of the dish, which is something dark and rich and meaty, and which distinctly does not smell of curry. They look, then, at each other.

“What is it?” Lister asks. “It doesn’t smell right.”

“It’s tomato,” Rimmer explains. “That’s the smell. It’s a tomato sauce.”

Lister frowns. “Like ketchup?”

“No,” Rimmer says gravely. “Like passata.”

Lister recoils. “You what?” he says, and he prods a finger into the sauce, wiggles it around, and discovers… “Pasta.”

“It’s as I feared,” Rimmer says. “He’s made spaghetti.”

“Spag bol?” Lister says dubiously. “For a date?”

Rimmer points an accusatory finger into Lister’s face. “This is your fault, anyway. You’re the one who showed him _Lady and the Tramp_.”

“It was that or my four-hundredth rewatch of _Dirty Dancing_ , and I couldn’t do it again.” Lister drags his hands down his face. “Baby was barely even in a corner—it doesn’t make any _sense_!”

Shaking his head, Rimmer takes a deep, slow breath. “There is no elegant way to eat this—and I’m eating it with _you_.”

“Hey!”

“You once managed to stain your clothes eating a slice of dry toast. And I’m wearing white!” Rimmer shakes his head. “This is madness. It’s like serving absinthe to the attendees of an A.A meeting—or gateau to French revolutionaries.”

“Look, we can salvage it. It’ll be alright.” Lister claps his hands together. “I’ll get some tabasco and it’ll be fine.” He glances at Rimmer, looks him up and down. “And I’ll get you a bib.”

Rimmer flips him off.

Loading up with enough spice to wipe out the Subcontinent, Lister sets about making his spaghetti edible, while Rimmer tries to meticulously cover his entire body with as many napkins as he can find, and then Lister shrugs out of his blazer to minimise the potential for wardrobe disasters. However, that backfires for him, because as he slings it inelegantly over the back of his chair, Rimmer’s eyes boggle.

“My God,” Rimmer says, “what on Titan have you done?”

Bewildered, Lister looks at him, and sees Rimmer staring down at Lister’s body—and Lister remembers too late why he kept the blazer on so long in the first place.

“Oh, yeah,” he says sheepishly, and looks down at the enormous brown hole burnt into the side of his shirt where he tried—and failed—to iron some of the creases out. “Whoops.”

“How did you manage that?” Rimmer asks incredulously.

“Mishap with the iron?”

Rimmer’s eyebrows lift higher. “How? You look like you’ve just been fished from the mouth of an active volcano—or a tanning salon in Romford.”

“Hey, I tried,” Lister protests. “I even had a wash and everything.”

Rimmer considers this. “Well, at least you don’t need to worry about ruining your shirt.”

Lister thinks that’s fair enough.

Ultimately, the spaghetti incident isn’t as bad as they feared. It’s actually pretty tasty, once Lister douses his plateful with tabasco to give it a little more kick, and Lister manages to only slop a tiny bit down his front. They eat until they’re full, and then they eat more until it starts to hurt, and Lister refrains from flicking spaghetti at Rimmer when he gets genuinely quite cross, and they open two, then four, then six more bottles of lager, and then Rimmer forgets about his hair and he takes his hat off, and Lister laughs so hard he thinks he might be sick.

It almost defies description—almost. Sort of an upside-down triangle, sort of plastered to his head at the sides, sort of frozen into place by an ungodly quantity of hair products, not even curly as much as just… dense. It looks like his hair has been carved out of a solid brick of Scotchbrite.

Lister presses his knuckles against his mouth like he’s trying to punch his laughter back into his face. “Oh,” he says helplessly. “Oh—Rimmer.”

“I did warn you,” Rimmer says glumly.

“Come here,” Lister says, and he scooches his chair awkwardly round the edge of the table so that he can reach for Rimmer and make an effort—a _lot_ of effort—to comb his fingers through that disgraceful birds’ nest. “How the smeg…”

“I blame the Cat.”

“What on Earth did he even say it was?”

“I can’t remember now—something or other keratin-based ultra-control something.”

Lister grimaces. He wipes some of the gunky gel, which is roughly the consistency of petrol, on his clothes and he pulls a face. “Are you sure that he wasn’t just winding you up?”

Rimmer heaves a long sigh. “Not outside the realms of possibility, I suppose.”

Lister shakes his head. “Probably trying to cock this up for you.”

“Probably succeeding.”

“Nah, you’re fine,” Lister says. Actually, Rimmer’s hair isn’t as bad as it first seems, although shoving a hat over the top hasn’t exactly helped. Now that Lister is breaking up some of the clumps, it’s loosening into something approaching natural, although he still looks a little bit like he’s been electrocuted. “You’ve definitely been worse.”

“When?”

Lister looks at him, eyebrows raised. “I don’t know how to tell you this, man, but your looks weren’t the major obstacle to us getting together.”

Rimmer purses his lips, thoughtful, and after a beat, he says, “It’s because I’m a twat, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” Lister says, and his hand slows through Rimmer’s hair to scratch over his scalp. “But then again, it’s not the barrier it used to be.”

He’s sort of smiling at him, but also sort of insulting him, and so it takes Lister by surprise when Rimmer leans in and kisses him.

He falls quiet, eyes drifting closed as Rimmer catches his bottom lip, kisses him slowly. Lister still has one hand braced on his knee, the other curled into Rimmer's hair, but he falters, because he doesn’t know what’s triggered this. Don’t get him wrong, Rimmer’s nothing if not enthusiastic when it comes to having a shag, but this—this feels different.

After a long moment, Rimmer pulls back. He doesn’t sit all the way back in his seat, though, but stays tilted forwards, close. He licks his lips and doesn’t quite meet Lister’s eyes, and for a moment, he says nothing. Lister tilts his head over to look at him carefully. “You alright, man?”

“I want,” Rimmer says, voice quiet, and then hesitates. “I—want you.”

Lister’s face breaks into a grin. “Well,” he says, and he shrugs, cocky and casual and feeling pretty full of himself. “Nothing new there, is it?”

“No, I mean—” Rimmer swallows. His eyes flick to Lister’s mouth. He takes a deep breath, steadying. “I mean, now.”

“Oh.” For a beat, Lister is stunned by it, unmoving, helpless. It’s doing something to him, this: Rimmer being—well, Lister wouldn’t use the word _confident_ here, let’s not get carried away—but decisive, at least, knowing what he wants. His lips part. He’s not exactly hard to get fired up in the first place, but the way that Rimmer leans into his space and looks at him with a quiet, assured expectation gets his blood beating faster.

Rimmer’s eyes fall to Lister’s mouth again, and stay there. “Right now.”

Lister nods. “Yeah, okay,” he says idiotically, like Rimmer has asked him for some mundane favour, but he doesn’t get much time to kick himself for being such a gormless twonk because Rimmer leans in again.

This time the kiss is more purposeful, hard enough that Lister has to hold on with a hand on Rimmer’s shoulder to keep from getting pushed off his chair sideways, and then Rimmer’s mouth opens on a shallow breath, and there is the careful press of his tongue, the hot slide together, the sharp, heavy way that desire drop-kicks in Lister’s belly to say, _God, yes, more, now_. Lister pushes back into him, his fingers tightening in Rimmer’s hair, kisses him back, harder, breathless, urgent.

Rimmer gets a hand round the back of Lister’s neck and a fist curled into the front of his shirt, and without warning, hauls him upright, drags him in close. Stumbling, Lister clutches at him for balance, and his breath snags as Rimmer lets go of Lister’s shirt to slide around to the small of his back, to pull him in closer, closer. Rimmer is broad and warm and solid against him, and Lister lifts onto his tiptoes to press against his body, arms twisting around Rimmer’s neck to drag his head down and fit their mouths together. 

Lister breathes him in deep, sinking back onto his heels, hands skimming down to hold Rimmer’s jaw—and then, out of seemingly nowhere, Rimmer, with a hand on Lister’s shoulder, turns him roughly around and pushes him against the table.

Lister’s thighs hit the edge of the table hard enough that he can feel he’ll have bruises tomorrow, and he half-sprawls over it, knocking over an empty beer bottle, and he plants his hands solidly on the table to keep himself from ending up face-first in a half-eaten tiramisu.

“Smegging hell,” Lister bursts out with a slightly hysterical laugh, but before he can do anything, Rimmer is pressed in close behind him. His hands are tight on Lister’s hips, holding him still, and Lister can feel the thick line of his dick against his arse. Lister’s pulse is echoing in his ears and he can feel that he is grinning like an idiot, but he can’t help it. “Buy me a drink first, man.”

Rimmer doesn’t dignify that with an answer. One of his hands slides over Lister’s abdomen, lower, flattens on his stomach and pins him there. His hand is huge and warm, long fingers pressing into Lister’s body through his clothes, and every nerve in Lister’s body wants that hand on his dick, but Rimmer doesn’t seem to be moving there anytime soon. Rimmer’s breath is shallow, ragged, hot against Lister’s ear as he leans in closer until Lister’s back is bracketed by Rimmer’s chest and they are touching everywhere. Everywhere except where it counts, that is—and Lister rocks back against Rimmer’s body, presses his arse into Rimmer’s dick to try and goad him into doing something. It doesn’t work.

Lister turns his head to try and kiss Rimmer, but he can’t reach and he can’t move, his mouth skimming uselessly over the bottom of Rimmer’s jaw. He can see Rimmer’s open mouth in his peripheral vision but he can’t get any closer, and he lets his breath out in a sharp huff of frustration. “Come on, Rimmer,” he says, embarrassed by how breathy his voice has gone in the last few minutes, and all that gets him is the curve of Rimmer’s smirk pressed into Lister’s temple.

Rimmer’s hands drag slowly over Lister’s body—over his chest, palms scratching over Lister’s nipples through the fabric of his shirt, over his ribs, his stomach, and then finally, at smegging last, down to squeeze Lister’s dick through his trousers.

A low sound rises in Lister’s throat, his whole body sparking with want— _yeah, please, more of that, keep touching me_ —even as Rimmer lets go, and Lister drops his head into his chest. “God, teaching you about foreplay was a mistake.”

This time, it’s definitely a laugh that Lister feels breathed against the back of his neck.

Lister grinds back against him, slow and deliberate, and he can feel how hard Rimmer is, can hear his breathing hitch, and he knows that Rimmer, the most impatient man in the known universe, can’t keep this up forever. Then again, maybe Lister will just spontaneously combust and die first—he feels like he’s going to vibrate out of his skin, his blood racing.

“Come on,” he says, and he leans further over the table, presses back harder into Rimmer in the same manoeuvre, and falls back on talking smeg to try and goad Rimmer into fucking him properly. “You forget what to do? You want me to talk you through it?” 

Rimmer takes a deep, slow breath. “Can you just be quiet for even one second?”

Lister grins. Jackpot. Without a moment’s delay, he dramatically sweeps the table clear, one clean slide of his hands to send all their dishes, their drinks, the leftovers of Kryten’s feast clattering and crashing to the floor—and then Rimmer palpably freezes behind him.

“Absolutely not, Lister—no!”

Lister’s face screws up in disbelief. “What?!”

Rimmer backs up to give him some space, and Lister straightens up, turns around. At least there’s some comfort in seeing how visibly fired up Rimmer is, his face pink, his eyes dark, his stupid white dress-uniform trousers straining—even if currently Rimmer looks aghast and not nearly as sexy as he seemed a minute ago. “Not on the table, Lister!” he says, appalled. “We eat here!”

Lister stares at him. “Then what the smeg are you doing bending me over it?!”

“I don’t know, I just thought it would be sexy!”

“It was sexy!” Lister exclaims. “I thought you were gonna fuck me!”

“I am! Just—not here, I mean, that would just be—”

“Smeg’s sake,” Lister bursts out, and he grabs hold of Rimmer’s sleeve to drag him upstairs—abandoning the chaos they’ve caused in the midsection, little serving dishes rolling away into corners, passata dripping down the table leg, cutlery scattered to the winds—and back to their quarters.

At the top of the stairs, the door to their quarters is shut, but they don’t slow down to get it open; Lister shoves Rimmer against it hard enough that he lets out a stupid little _oof_ as his back hits the metal. Lister presses against him, his hands fumbling with the buttons on the front of his dress-jacket, although a distraction comes in the form of Rimmer’s thigh pushed between Lister’s legs and Lister rubs against him, gasping, so stupidly turned-on that for a second it’s like he forgets how to multitask, how to get someone undressed, and he is just holding onto Rimmer’s clothes and grinding against his thigh.

Rimmer gropes blindly for the door-panel, slaps a hand to it, and with a low whoosh, the door slides open, and they nearly fall through it. Staggering, clinging to each other, kicking things over, they find their way inside. Lister grabs Rimmer by the ears and pulls his head down to kiss him again. Rimmer makes a muffled sound of complaint into Lister’s mouth, but then Lister sucks on his bottom lip and he stops whinging pretty quick.

Lister gets his hand into Rimmer’s disastrously frizzy hair, tugs just enough for Rimmer’s mouth to fall open on a shaky breath, and their tongues slip together, hot, slick, and Lister wants so much that he can’t organise his thoughts to decide what he wants first. He wants all of it, all at once: all of Rimmer, everywhere, all the time.

At last, Rimmer gets his jacket unbuttoned, and Lister pushes it off his shoulders, shoving at it with both hands until it drops to the floor—and for a second, Rimmer pauses, pulls back as though he’s gonna actually try and hang his clothes up.

“Leave it, it’s fine,” Lister says, sliding his hands down over Rimmer’s chest.

“It’ll get creased—”

“I’ll iron it for you, alright, just—”

“No way, I’ve seen your ironing,” Rimmer points out, and emphasises this by pushing a hand through the hole burnt in Lister’s shirt to palm over the skin of his hip. Lister can’t argue with that, but at least Rimmer does stop trying to tidy up.

They break apart for a moment to get clothes off, quicker and more adept at removing their own kit than each other’s. Lister hooks a thumb in the back of his shirt collar and yanks the whole thing over his head without stopping for buttons—he hears a few ping and clatter on various surfaces—while Rimmer is toeing off his shoes and shrugging out of his braces, and then he catches sight of Lister’s shoes.

“Why are you wearing boots?” he asks incredulously. “You look like an electrician at the Met Gala.”

Lister chucks a boot at him, which Rimmer just about dodges, and then it’s trousers down, stumbling about to peel off socks. Lister gets his clothes off first—Rimmer is slower because he keeps nitpicking about Lister’s sartorial choices—and then he snaps his fingers and points at Rimmer’s sock suspenders. “Keep those on.”

Rimmer blinks. “What?”

Lister doesn’t clarify. Instead, he grabs at the hem of Rimmer’s undershirt and helps him to peel it off, although they only get as far as Rimmer getting his arms free, and then it is left hanging uselessly around his neck as Lister kisses him again and doesn’t let up. Rimmer pushes him towards the bunks—tripping over discarded clothes, a toolbox, an empty can of baked beans— and then Lister climbs awkwardly in. He flops back against the side of the bunk, legs sprawled inelegantly, half-sitting up, and he reaches unconsciously for Rimmer as he crawls in after, bumping his head and swearing and, at last, coming to kneel over Lister’s body. 

“Took your time,” Lister says, although his voice comes out softer than intended, and then his hands find Rimmer’s bare skin. His hands are everywhere.

Fingers grazing along the line of Rimmer’s collarbone, palming over the slope of his shoulder, dragging a thumb over his nipple, fitting his hand to Rimmer’s hip—and Rimmer, on his hands and knees over him, breathing wobbly and pink to the tips of his ears. When Lister’s hands skim down Rimmer’s side, over his ribs where he’s ticklish, Rimmer’s breath catches. When Lister’s fingers trail up the inside of Rimmer’s thigh, it’s a full-body shiver, and when Lister goes for his dick, rubbing his palm over the head, Rimmer’s mouth opens on a guttural, breathless sound.

With his other hand, Lister cups Rimmer’s cheek, his thumb rubbing at the corner of Rimmer’s mouth. The pad of his thumb bumps over Rimmer’s bottom lip, and then slides inside. Lister presses his thumb to Rimmer’s tongue, the wet heat sparking want deeper in Lister’s bones, and the way that Rimmer goes quiet, pliant, watching Lister with dark-eyed anticipation, makes Lister feel not unlike his throat is closing up, like he can’t breathe. He runs his thumb over Rimmer’s tongue, drags his mouth open, and kisses him, deep and slow. 

Rimmer’s nose bumps alongside Lister’s, and when he breaks away to breathe, he murmurs against Lister’s mouth, “You can just tell me to shut up, you know.”

Lister kisses him again. “What’re you on about?”

Rimmer inhales through his nose. “Just—saying I get it,” he says. “You have to—you just can just tell me to pipe down, if—if you need me to.” He moves in to kiss Lister again, but then Lister pulls his head back, clear away to give him space to look at Rimmer properly.

“Wait, what?” Lister frowns. “Rimmer, I’m not trying to get you to shut up.”

For a moment, Rimmer just frowns back at him—like he’s not the one who started this whole conversation. “No, I just meant—I know you used to do that when you wanted me to be quiet, so—”

“Yeah, when you used to spend ninety percent of every shag mouthing off about how low you’d dropped your standards.”

Rimmer’s frown deepens. “Did I?”

Lister is holding him at arms’ length, his hands braced on Rimmer’s shoulders, staring at him in exasperated disbelief. “Yeah,” he says emphatically. “But not anymore.”

All at once, Rimmer sort of relaxes, and also sort of doesn’t. Some of the tension seeps from his shoulders, but the frown only deepens. “So—you doing that— putting your, erm—fingers, that is, in my mouth—you’re not just… trying to make me shut up?”

“God, no,” Lister says simply. “I just constantly want to fuck your mouth, that’s all.”

“Oh.” In one syllable, Rimmer’s voice wavers between two different octaves.

Lister cocks his eyebrows. “Alright?”

Rimmer swallows. “Yes, alright,” he says, and without a moment’s further hesitation, he shimmies down the mattress, then climbs out of the bunk altogether to kneel between Lister’s spread knees.

“I didn’t mean now,” Lister tries to say, bewildered, but he’s not exactly in a frantic hurry to stop Rimmer while he’s down there, and then Rimmer is mouthing at the base of Lister’s dick, and Lister doesn’t think he could stop Rimmer for all the money in the universe.

His head tips back against the wall, a slow breath shaking out from his lungs, and he closes his eyes, leaning into the warm, steady pulse of desire narrowing between his thighs. Rimmer plants a hand on either of Lister’s knees to push his legs wider, and Lister lifts his hips for it, but Rimmer, it seems, is taking his sweet time. He presses open-mouthed kisses to the inside of Lister’s thighs, noses into the crease of his groin, scrapes his teeth over the thin skin of his hip, sucks at the ridge of bone there until a sound like a whine lifts in Lister’s throat.

“Come on, man,” Lister says, starting to squirm. “Get on with it.”

Still no luck. Rimmer’s breath fans damply over Lister’s skin, and when Lister lifts his hips more insistently for attention, his dick bumps Rimmer’s jaw and leaves a tacky line of pre-come under his chin, but still doesn’t prompt him into actually doing anything. It’s infuriating, agonising, and Lister feels like if he doesn’t get some serious physical contact on his dick in the next thirty seconds, he’s going to give Rimmer an overzealous haircut with a hacksaw.

Lister slams the heels of his hands down against the mattress. “Rimmer, come on,” he says, and only realises as the words are going out that he’s breathless, his voice gone thin. “Suck me off or don’t, but if you don’t do something soon, I’m gonna—”

He only gets as far as lifting one hand threateningly, as though to wank himself off, when Rimmer slaps his hand away.

“Ow,” Lister complains—because it actually stings—and he’s about to tell Rimmer off, to say that for someone who wanted a shag, he’s going a funny way about it by not doing anything useful with the cock he’s got right in front of his face, but then Rimmer sucks him into his mouth, and Lister forgets what he wanted to complain about.

He makes a noise in no discernible language, and his back arches in a long, slow shiver. He gives himself over to it—to the heat and pressure of Rimmer’s mouth, the slide of his tongue, Rimmer’s lips catching under the head as he pulls off. Those long fingers wrapped around the base of Lister’s dick, Rimmer’s free hand on Lister’s hip to pull him in, pull him deeper. The careful press of his thumb against the vein on the underside, his tongue dipping into the slick at the head in a way that makes Lister’s whole body shudder, his hips bucking wildly at the electric shock of heat.

“Fuck,” Lister groans, and he threads his fingers through Rimmer’s hair, softer now that Lister’s been running his hands through it, and Rimmer makes a low sound around his dick, a sound that gets under Lister’s skin, makes his hips snap forwards harder. He says it again, “Fuck, Rimmer, _fuck_ ,” because his brain is taking a sabbatical and he can’t think of a single thing else to say, and then there is a totally obscene slurping noise as Rimmer tries to swallow around him and Lister isn’t capable of saying anything.

It’s too much, all of it—the shape of himself faintly seen through Rimmer’s cheek, the muscle jumping in Rimmer’s jaw, the way he gets into the rhythm of it, rolling with the flexing of Lister’s hips, letting Lister push incrementally faster, harder into his wet and ready mouth. Lister can feel his thighs trembling as the heat in the gut curls tighter and more urgent, and he can hear the rough sound that rises from his throat every time he thrusts into Rimmer’s mouth.

That pink flush is staining Rimmer’s throat, spreading across his collarbone, down to his chest, and the furrow between his eyebrows is one that Lister recognises—the squint when he’s trying hard not to come. Rimmer’s free hand clenches and unclenches over Lister’s hip, his nails digging in; it’s not gonna take much.

Lister’s close, desperately close, his pulse speeding, and he fucks harder into Rimmer’s mouth. His hands tighten in Rimmer’s hair, inadvertently tugging, and Rimmer whines in the back of his throat, forehead creasing as he fights it, and his free hand goes instead to his dick to hold himself off. Lister breathes ragged because he wants more, he wants it, and he pants it out— _yeah, yeah, fuck, fuck, fuck_ —and he comes. His fists jerk in Rimmer’s hair as he grinds forwards to finish in his mouth, and apparently that’s all it takes to drag Rimmer over the finish-line with him.

It’s something of a mess. Rimmer comes across Lister’s legs and the bunk wall, and Lister comes mostly in Rimmer’s mouth but not entirely; now Rimmer wrinkles his nose, wiping his face with the back of his hand, and sort of sways between Lister’s legs until a hand on the back of his neck pulls him in to lean his cheek against Lister’s knee. He looks, in the politest way possible, absolutely ruined, his mouth wet and bruised-looking, his ears red, his hair visibly tufted into hand-holds, and Lister’s stupid oral fixation does its level best to get him interested again, a half-hearted kick of desire in his gut at the sight of Rimmer’s swollen, pink lower lip.

“You okay?” Lister says breathlessly, pushing Rimmer’s hair back from his face.

Rimmer blinks up at him, seemingly dazed. “Hm?”

Lister breaks out in a grin. “Are—you—okay,” he repeats, more slowly, and he curls his fingers into Rimmer’s hair, scratches gently over his scalp.

Rimmer presses his face into Lister’s bare thigh and makes a garbled sound against his skin, and Lister laughs.

“Two for the price of one’s not bad, though!” Lister says.

Rimmer grumbles, and after a beat, lifts his head, propping his chin on Lister’s leg. “It would be nice to make it to the main event for once,” he says crossly, and it’s all Lister can do not to laugh at him again, because his voice is wrecked.

“You’re alright, you’ll be ready to go again in, what…” Lister pretends to shake back an invisible sleeve to check his watch. “Thirty seconds?”

Rimmer rolls his eyes. “Not quite,” he says, and he plants a hand on Lister’s knee to lever himself up onto his feet and crawl back into the bunk. “Forty-five, maybe.”

Lister grins. “That’s the spirit.” He pushes both hands into Rimmer’s hair to drag him in for a kiss, feeling stupidly fond of him. “Come on, it’s not like you’re missing out on anything, is it?”

With a good deal of grumbling, Rimmer reluctantly concedes to this, pushing his face into the crook of Lister’s neck. “I just wish I could—oh, I don’t know,” he complains. “Slow down, I suppose. Stretch things out enough to properly enjoy it.”

Lister arches his eyebrows. “You telling me you’re not enjoying yourself?”

“What? No—no, of course I’m—I just mean—” Rimmer flounders helplessly. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I think I do,” Lister says, taking pity on him. He tilts his head over, considering. “And you know, I think I can help with that.” He palms Rimmer’s hip, pulling to indicate for him to turn over.

“Mm?” Rimmer moves as instructed, if too tall to be strictly pliant, at least cooperative, while Lister shimmies about awkwardly to accommodate him.

Rimmer lies flat on his stomach, his cheek pillowed on one arm, and when Lister skims a hand down his back, he can’t help himself from squeezing a handful of Rimmer’s arse. That’s the moment when Rimmer jolts and goes rigid.

“Wait, what are you doing?” he asks, his voice shooting high, and he looks back over his shoulder with wide eyes. “Lister, stop—what are you—”

“Hey, relax, man.” Lister lifts both hands as though in surrender, to show Rimmer that he’s not trying anything. “Look, I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m not gonna—what was it— _roger_ you or whatever.”

Rimmer does relax, although not by much. He presses the side of his face back into his arm, but he doesn’t lie flat again; he is watching Lister with trepidation, although not with mistrust.

“I was gonna do something else to you, though—if you’re alright with it,” Lister says, and he lays a hand on the back of Rimmer’s thigh, thumb rubbing soothing circles against his skin. “You can tell me no. You can tell me to stop, no way, never in a million years—you won’t hurt my feelings or nothing, I promise.”

Rimmer swallows. “Tell me.”

Lister says bluntly, “Well, I was planning on putting my tongue up your arse.”

For a moment, Rimmer doesn’t react. He just looks back at Lister, and Lister wonders briefly if he just didn’t hear him, and then, finally, Rimmer says, “Is this some kind of joke?”

“What?”

“Because I’ll have you know,” Rimmer says, going on in a voice so carefully even that it’s slightly unsettling, “that after thirty-one years of fending off those comments, they’re not remotely funny anymore, and I wouldn’t have expected them from you.”

Lister sits back on his heels. “Rimmer, I’ve got no idea what you’re on about.”

For a moment, Rimmer says nothing, but he is palpably bristling, his shoulders a tense line. Then, through his teeth, he grits out, “ _Rimmer_.”

Lister chews thoughtfully on the side of his thumbnail. “Oh, right,” he says. “I mean—okay. But—I’m not gonna lick you out for a laugh, man. Seems like a lot of effort on my part for a joke that’s not even worth it.”

Rimmer is silent.

“Besides, who would I even make the joke for?” Lister pauses, hands on his thighs. “Rimmer, serious question, now. Look at me.” He waits until Rimmer lifts his head. “When was the last time I made a joke to genuinely, properly hurt you?”

Silence again. Lister doesn’t know if it’s because Rimmer’s being stubborn or if he really is trying to think back, and Lister doesn’t know if he should be kind of offended by this—by the fact that Rimmer doesn’t know this already, that it’s not obvious a mile off. Even in the old days, even when Rimmer was insufferable and Lister’s every waking moment was consumed by how to drive him mental—it was never cruel.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Lister says quietly. “It’s not a joke, man. But I think you’ll like it, and I want to, if you’ll let me.”

Rimmer hesitates, face still half-turned into the side of his arm, but the unfortunate tell is that he’s going very red. His ears are burning, and when he at last clears his throat to answer, he stammers through it without much coherency. “I don’t—I don’t know if—erm. I don’t think it’ll be good—for—for you.”

Lister gives him a flat look. “I promise I’ll enjoy it.”

“How do you know? You—”

“Rimmer,” Lister interrupts, laying a hand on the back of Rimmer’s thigh. There are goosebumps, there, the fine hair lifting as he shivers. “Do you want me to?”

At that, Rimmer goes quiet again. He squirms for a moment on the mattress. The pink flush is spreading gradually down his throat, across his shoulders. “Erm—I—I mean. Alright, then.”

“Yeah?”

Rimmer drops his face into the pillow. “Shut up and—and get on with it.”

Lister grins and climbs into position, kneeling between Rimmer’s legs, and he leans over him to kiss down his spine. He takes his time, trying to trick Rimmer into relaxing, his hands soothing over the backs of Rimmer’s thighs, laying slow, open-mouthed kisses over each vertebrae, the dimples in the small of his back, everywhere. He kisses Rimmer until his hips are shifting minutely against the mattress, and then kisses lower. He palms his arse, digs his nails in, presses a smile into the back of Rimmer’s thigh when he hears his breath catch. Lister does it again, and then he shoulders inelegantly in between Rimmer’s spread legs, and he gets to work.

The first time he flattens his tongue over Rimmer’s hole, the reaction is instant—Rimmer tenses, hands fisting into the sheet, and then his breath punches out, a harsh wordless shudder of a sound. Lister goes slow, steady, careful, and with each sweep of his tongue, Rimmer’s breath comes shakier and shakier, and his back arches to push back into it.

Lister presses the pad of his thumb just behind Rimmer’s balls, and Rimmer makes a breathless whine of a sound; Lister pushes inside, shallow, gentle little fucks of his tongue, and the noise that lifts from Rimmer’s throat is obscene, half-muffled into his pillow but still filthy. There are words in it, just _yes, yes, yes, yes_ , and Rimmer’s hips rock uselessly, seeking friction. His hips pitch between rubbing against the mattress and pressing back into Lister’s mouth for more, and it’s so hot that Lister can feel it drop heavily in his stomach, a hungry pulse of desire. He’s not like Rimmer, can’t get it up in two minutes like he can, but God, this is doing things to him that puts his refractory period through its paces. Rimmer’s whole body is trembling, his thighs unconsciously flexing against Lister’s shoulders, and every time Lister fucks into him, he makes this low, guttural sound in the back of his throat that Lister’s pretty sure he has no control over.

When Lister presses in deeper, curls his tongue inside him, Rimmer makes a choked noise that rides near a sob, and his voice cracks on the incomprehensible stream of gibberish that comes out of his mouth— _oh God, oh God, I’m, yes, oh_ —and he’s breathing in deep, shaky gulps and it sounds like he might even be crying. His shoulders rise high and tense as he pushes his face into his pillow, and that’s when Lister sits up.

“What—where—” Rimmer’s voice is a ruin, a reedy, thin croak, and when he lifts his head, his face is flushed and sweating, his hair curling over his forehead. “I don’t—”

“There you go,” Lister says, and slaps Rimmer’s arse hard enough that he jerks with a little yelp. “You’ve made it to the main event.”

Rimmer blinks at him like he’s speaking Swahili, blank and uncomprehending. “What?”

“You were gonna fuck me,” Lister prompts. “Ring any bells?”

“I mean—yes, but—” Rimmer’s brow furrows. “You were—you—”

“To get you up, not to get you off.” Lister drums both hands on Rimmer’s arse like he’s playing the bongos. “Now are you gonna get up here and show me a good time, or shall I just wedge a thumb up my own arse and call it a day?”

“Give me a second.” Rimmer flops back down, his head hitting the pillow with a dull thump. “I just need to—to—remember how to use my legs.”

“Left, right, left, usually.”

As Rimmer wiggles round to lie on his back, Lister braces his hands either side of Rimmer’s body to lean in and kiss him. However, before he can get anywhere close, Rimmer flinches back, eyes comedically wide with horror. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What?” Lister frowns. “Oh—hey, don’t worry, you don’t taste of nothing.” He grins. “No sweetcorn or anything.”

Rimmer sort of gags. “God. That’s disgusting. No—no.”

“I swear, it was dead sexy.”

“No way. You—clean your mouth.”

“You want me to wash my mouth out with soap?”

“Yes,” Rimmer says emphatically.

Lister stretches to reach past him for the mouthwash on the shelf at the head of Rimmer’s bed, uncaps it, and chugs from the bottle. It tastes rank, but he gulps it down quickly, like a shot of dark liquor—and then when he looks back at Rimmer, he sees him looking, if possible, more dismayed than before.

“You’re not supposed to just drink it,” he shrieks. “You’re supposed to swill it round your mouth and then spit it out, you maniac!”

Lister frowns. “What’s the point of that, then?”

Rimmer drags a hand over his face, agonised. “Please—please just brush your teeth properly.”

Lister rolls his eyes, but does as he’s told, because if he does this right, then getting railed by Rimmer might still be on the cards. Rimmer even sits up—albeit gingerly, shakily—swinging his legs round to sit on the edge of the bunk to nag him and dictate correct brushing technique, which makes the whole thing feel like it takes ten million years. _You’re brushing too hard, don’t forget the other side, no way was that thirty seconds_ —and when finally, Lister is finished, Rimmer makes him duck down so that he can actually sniff Lister’s smegging mouth before he is satisfied.

At last, Rimmer gives him a hesitant kiss which Lister gradually deepens with a hand round the back of Rimmer’s neck, and Rimmer sighs into his mouth. That’s all the cue Lister needs; he climbs into Rimmer’s lap, his knees on the mattress either side of Rimmer’s hips. When Lister shifts his weight, he can feel the line of Rimmer’s dick against his inner thigh, and the slightest friction gets Rimmer hissing between his teeth.

Lister cradles Rimmer’s jaw in both hands, tilts his head into the kiss, opens up for the wet shock of Rimmer’s tongue. Lister sucks Rimmer’s lower lip into his mouth, breathes in the soft noise that Rimmer makes, and Rimmer's hands skim over Lister’s bare skin. Rimmer’s fingers on him—throat, chest, stomach, abdomen, thighs— make heat coil in his gut, and he wants to chase it wherever it goes. Rimmer’s hand falters, then, at Lister’s tailbone, the tip of his index finger dipping into the crack of his arse, and Rimmer pulls away to look him in the face.

“Can I…” he asks tentatively, and Lister nods.

Rimmer makes quick work of opening him up—-in part because Lister had the foresight to do some of this earlier, in part because he’s just impatient, rocking back into Rimmer’s hand for more, more. Lister presses close into Rimmer to reach past him for the lube on his shelf, and he fumbles with it, slicking his fingers clumsily. When he reaches down between them to grip Rimmer’s hand, their fingers tangle and slip together, and then Rimmer is sliding deeper, and Lister gasps against the corner of Rimmer’s mouth.

“Come on,” he pants, bracing a hand on Rimmer’s shoulder so that he can arch back into it until Rimmer’s fingers are buried knuckle-deep. It feels like Lister’s whole body is drawing towards him, a shiver prickling across his skin as Rimmer shifts to flex, to twist, his fingers stretching, and Lister can feel his heart in his throat. “Come on—more, come on—”

Rimmer spreads his free hand flat in the dip of Lister’s back to steady him as he hauls him in closer, fucks into him faster, and his dick nudges Lister’s hip as he works him open. He is breathing open-mouthed, ducking his head to nose at the hinge of Lister’s jaw, and his breath rushes warm over Lister’s throat. “But—you’re not—erm—hard.”

“Yeah, I’m not a modern miracle like you,” Lister points out. “It’s gonna take a minute for me to catch up. But I’m getting there, don’t you worry.”

“Alright,” Rimmer says, and he takes a deep breath. “Maybe this will help.” His fingers move from Lister’s back to skim down from his elbow, the length of his forearm, to find his hand, and then he lifts Lister’s hand to take his fingers into his mouth.

“Oh my god,” Lister says, sort of choking on his own tongue. “Rimmer, what the smeg have I done to you?”

It’s more than Lister can process—Arnold Rimmer, the universe’s primmest, stuffiest, fussiest man, a man with all the inherent sex appeal of a used Wet Wipe, a man who had got laid a grand total of once before he ever started fooling around with Lister, who once said that foreplay was _for wimps who are too frightened to just stick it in_ —sucking Lister’s first two fingers into his wet, pink mouth while he fingers him open. Jesus Christ.

Lister thumbs over Rimmer’s bottom lip, presses down on Rimmer’s tongue, pushes deeper until his fingertips flirt at Rimmer’s throat, and Rimmer dips his head, lips slack, for more. Lister’s dick twitches heavily against his thigh, and okay, so Rimmer wasn’t wrong that this is all it takes to get Lister fired up. Rimmer’s tongue curls into the webbing between his fingers, sucking at his knuckles with a wet noise, and then Rimmer’s own fingers flex inside Lister’s arse, and it’s too much all at once. There is a dull throb of heat, a squeezing in the pit of Lister’s gut that renders him incapable of making any noise other than the low moan that rises in his chest. His fingers slip from Rimmer’s mouth; his knees tighten around Rimmer’s waist and he digs his nails into Rimmer’s shoulder. “Oh—fuck—”

“Now?” Rimmer asks, his voice hoarse.

“Now, now, right now,” Lister says, and he grabs at the lube again, upending a stupid quantity into his palm in his haste. He slicks Rimmer’s dick fast, urgent, clumsy, and Rimmer holds himself still like he can’t be trusted to move, which maybe he can’t, given his stamina. He has one hand on Lister’s thigh, fingertips pressing hard enough to bruise, and he is breathing shallowly through his nose. Lister slows in jacking Rimmer off as he kneels over him, and with the hand not covered in lube, Lister gently touches Rimmer’s jaw. “Hey, man, you still with me?”

Rimmer’s chin lifts as he works to swallow. “Just about.”

In slow, incremental motions, Lister sinks down onto him, inch by inch, until Rimmer slides home, and Lister is fully seated in his lap, bony hips digging into Lister’s inner thighs.

Lister’s head tips back as he lets out a long, shivering breath. God, it’s so good, the way that he feels almost wrenched open, his whole body alive with it, thrumming finely like a live wire. Lister swallows, and when he looks back at Rimmer, he finds him looking ragged, desperate. Rimmer is pink-cheeked, dark-eyed, open-mouthed, his chest heaving, looking slightly like he’s just been hit by a car.

With a deep breath, Lister’s hands skim down over Rimmer’s bare chest, his skin damp with sweat, his ribs rising and falling beneath Lister’s palms. “You okay?” Lister asks.

Rimmer nods mutely.

“You need a second?” Lister says, although his voice comes out strained. “I can talk about something really unsexy, if you like.”

“No, thank you,” Rimmer rasps. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, his forehead creasing in concentration. “Just—just—give me a moment.”

Lister sweeps a hand round the back of Rimmer’s neck, twines his thumb into the damp curl of hair at this nape, tugs just gently enough to tilt Rimmer’s face up, and Rimmer’s mouth opens. He looks at Lister’s mouth, and then he presses in to kiss him.

The movement shifts Lister’s weight in Rimmer’s lap, pushes Rimmer deeper, and Lister’s mouth falls open on a wordless groan against Rimmer’s lips. He can feel Rimmer everywhere, the dull ache and stretch and pressure of being filled, the heat of Rimmer under and inside him. His throat is tight, his heart clutching, and there is a quick-pounding pulse that Lister can feel in his thighs, rising through his body to leave him light-headed, and he doesn’t know if it’s himself or Rimmer that he’s feeling.

He carefully rolls his hips forwards, thighs splaying wider, and Rimmer’s breath hitches, his lips parting enough for Lister to slide his tongue into his mouth and breathe him in. Want simmers within him, a hungry thing that needs and needs, and if Lister doesn’t get fucked—really, properly fucked senseless—then he thinks he might burst.

Enough fannying about. Lister lifts himself on his knees, his breathing hissing out at the rough, wet slide, and then he grinds his hips down into Rimmer. He moves, shallow rolls at first, measured and steady, and he leans back from Rimmer to push back harder against him. Rimmer is breathing in short, laboured gulps, chest heaving, and he swallows the tiny noises that rise in his throat to escape. Lister slides a hand up over Rimmer’s chest, and his fingers trail along the column of his throat. “Come on,” he urges, low and hungry, “I want to hear you. Tell me, tell me—”

“That’s—that feels—” Rimmer manages, and then his mouth snaps shut with a click of teeth, colour breaking out across his already flushed face. He swallows.

“Go on,” Lister says. “Tell me.”

“Good,” Rimmer bursts out, and then looks mortified afterwards, but with a tightening of his jaw, he powers through: “It feels good.”

“Yeah?” Lister says, prompting. “Like this?”

He shifts his weight forwards onto his knees, lifts up until the head of Rimmer’s dick snags at his entrance and Rimmer’s mouth falls open and Lister’s every nerve ending is alight. Then he rolls back down, fucks himself to the hilt in one slow movement, and it’s totally involuntary, the shudder of sound that punches out of his chest, his throat squeezing, but Rimmer near-enough shouts—a disorganised stream of, _God_ _, oh, yes, yes, God, shit._

“Yeah?” Lister pants, fingers still in Rimmer’s hair. He’s all the way there, now, so hard it hurts, and every time he moves his hips down into Rimmer’s thrust, the head of his dick bumps Rimmer’s abdomen, leaves a smear of slick across the pale skin there. Lister feels stretched taut, his skin sweat-slippery against Rimmer’s. “Like that?”

Rimmer is nodding wildly, like a tourist taking directions in a foreign language. “Yes, yes, like that,” he babbles. “But—I mean—no, actually, also—not—I want—”

Lister slings his arms around Rimmer’s neck, dips his head, and Rimmer catches his mouth. He kisses him breathless, hot and messy and desperate, tongues slick together, gasping into each other’s mouths to stay afloat. “What do you want?” Lister bites into his bottom lip. “Say it.”

“More,” Rimmer says uselessly, “more, more,” and when he kisses Lister back it’s all teeth, all tongue, a groan barely stifled when Lister’s thighs flex to rock down onto him in a building pace, faster. “No—no, like—” Rimmer swallows, throat working. “Harder.” His voice is breathy, embarrassed. He repeats himself, louder. “Harder.”

Lister delivers. He rolls down sharply against him at Rimmer’s next thrust to bury him so deep it wrestles a guttural moan from him, and Rimmer actually whines through his teeth at that.

“Like—like that,” Rimmer manages, flushing hot, and his hips are bucking up to meet Lister. His mouth is hanging open. “Yes—yes. Fuck, fuck, yes, please. Like that.”

Lister fists his hand in Rimmer’s hair in a jerk sudden enough to yank his head back, and Rimmer’s pace stutters as he makes a desperate, wordless sound, and Lister is breathing ragged as he rides him hard and fast. He gets hold of the edge of the upper bunk for leverage, so he can snap his hips forwards, fuck himself on Rimmer’s dick harder, and with that, each thrust catches this hot pressure low in his belly that makes his breath cut out and his toes curl and he wants it, all of it, everything.

“Come on, come on,” Lister says. “Like that, like that, keep going. Come on, you said harder, so fuck me harder, big man, come on.”

Then Rimmer shifts his grip to get hold of Lister’s hips, really grabbing him, digging his hands into the soft flesh of his waist to hold on tight and haul Lister bodily with him, pulling Lister down hard onto Rimmer’s dick. Lister says, “Oh my god,” and his voice cracks in a way he hasn’t heard since he was about fourteen, because that pressure is building, arcing and fizzing like a box of fireworks, and the heat is enormous, bigger than his body. He feels like he can’t breathe, his throat tight with every exhaled breath a low, greedy sound, sometimes wordless and frantic, sometimes tangled semi-coherently with _yeah, like that, Rimmer, keep going, fuck, fuck, fuck_. He’s so painfully, dizzyingly close that he can’t think of anything else except blind, desperate want.

“Lister,” Rimmer says, mouth wet and slack on his collar-bone, “Lister, Lister,” and his teeth drag over the rise of Lister’s pectoral muscle, an effort to bite and suck a mark there that falls apart on his next thrust, and then in a voice that is scratched open and raw, he asks, “Is it good—is this good—are you—”

“God, yeah, it’s good,” Lister gasps out. His fingers flex on the side of the bunk where he hangs on for leverage to roll back harder onto Rimmer’s dick, to take him deeper. “It’s good, it’s good, Rimmer—swear to God, if you stop, I’m gonna—fuck, fuck, oh, _fuck_ , Rimmer—”

Rimmer’s mouth is on Lister’s nipple when Rimmer wraps one huge, warm hand around Lister’s dick. The sound Lister makes at that is one he’ll deny until the day he dies, a low, needing groan into the corner of Rimmer’s mouth that hiccups into a sort of a gasp, and Lister is over-sensitive, wrung-out, shaking under Rimmer’s touch.

His hips move in aborted, uncoordinated jerks, his body shifting without his brain having any say-so in it and unable to decide whether to fuck forwards into Rimmer’s fist or back onto Rimmer’s dick, and then Lister, shaking, is reduced to burying his face in Rimmer’s throat and just clutching at him, holding on. Rimmer’s fingers tighten underneath the head of Lister’s dick and it’s too much, fuck, it’s so good and it aches in him, overwhelming and excruciating and _fuck_ , Lister wants, he wants—and he comes.

It feels like his orgasm is wrenched out of him with a crowbar, and when Lister comes back to himself, he is wrapped round Rimmer’s body like a limpet, shaking and unsteady. His arms are tight round Rimmer’s neck and his hips are still moving in lazy, unconscious rolls, although every movement grazes the head of his dick against Rimmer’s stomach in a way that makes his whole body jerk beyond his control. He feels not unlike how he imagines a paper towel must feel if you squeezed it out and tried to use it again.

“Lister?” Rimmer asks, voice rough but also edged with worry.

“Fuck me, man,” Lister croaks.

“I was trying to,” Rimmer says, although the rush of relief through him is palpable. “Are you alright? I thought I might’ve killed you.”

Lister smothers a laugh into the sweat-damp slope of Rimmer’s shoulder, and lifts his head. “Steady on, Casanova,” he says. “I’m still breathing.” He slaps a hand resoundingly to Rimmer’s side. “Dead proud of you, though.”

For what is probably the first time ever, Rimmer has nothing to say. He ducks his head, flushes pinker than ever, his ears glowing hot, and he tries not to look too pleased.

Lister rubs a thumb over Rimmer’s ribs and kisses him. It starts slow, Lister’s tongue soothing his mouth open, Rimmer making a low noise of want into it, but Rimmer is still buried deep inside him. He rocks shallowly into Lister, ineffectual little fucks, desperate and helpless, and when Lister leans forwards to deepen the kiss, Rimmer’s dick presses deeper and his mouth falls open with a groan that seems electrocuted from him. His fingers dig hard into Lister’s thighs, and he closes his eyes tight.

“Lister,” Rimmer says, after a moment, his voice strained. There is sweat beading his upper lip, his hair damp and curling at his ears and neck. He is pink all the way down to his chest and his breathing is unsteady. “Do you think we could—”

“Oh—yeah. Hang on.” Lister shifts his knees wider to accommodate Rimmer moving, and then Rimmer gets a hand under one of Lister’s thighs—pressing a sticky handprint into Lister’s skin in the process—and carefully turns him over.

It’s a relief to flop back onto the mattress, Lister won’t lie, even lying awkwardly diagonal as he is. Rimmer braces himself over Lister—one knee on the mattress, one foot on the floor somewhere, Lister’s thigh hooked high over his hip—and he dips his head to kiss him, his mouth finding Lister’s throat, his Adam’s apple, the pulse point underneath his jaw, each kiss all slow, wet heat, his tongue on Lister’s skin. When he pushes inside, Lister sighs, back arching into it, and he doesn’t think he could get it up again any time soon if you offered him a million dollar-pounds and a shortcut home, but God, it feels good.

Lister wraps a hand round the nape of Rimmer’s neck to anchor him and pull him in, lifts his hips into each thrust so that when Rimmer slides home he feels it shiver right down to his marrow. Over him, Rimmer is coming apart, sweat gleaming in the dip of his collarbone, a fine tremor running through his arms where he holds himself up. His breath is coming in quick, shaky bursts as he fucks into Lister—steady, at first, then less gently, his hips snapping forwards hard enough that Lister slides up the mattress.

“Fuck, Rimmer,” Lister breathes.

“Is it okay?” Rimmer asks raggedly, and he dips his head as though to kiss Lister, but doesn’t quite make it there. “Is it okay, is it—”

“It’s good, Rimmer, it’s really good,” Lister says, and he kisses Rimmer’s open mouth, sucking at his lower lip, and he pushes both hands into his damp curls to hold him there. “Come on, nearly there, darlin’. You’re doing good.”

Somehow, Rimmer flushes impossibly redder, and there is a noise like a strangled whine in the back of his throat. He tilts his forehead against Lister’s, gasping into the space between them as the pace of his rolling hips begins to stutter, and in a threadbare voice, he manages, “Lister— _Lister_ —” and then it’s over. With a shudder down the length of his spine and a long, low groan, he jackhammers—once, twice—and then presses in deep as he comes.

Lister holds him through it, one hand scratching through his hair, the other soothing down between his sweat-slick shoulder-blades, and when Rimmer sags to flop against him, he kisses his temple.

Every muscle in Lister’s body aches, but it’s hard to summon any real concern for that at the minute when he’s got this—Rimmer, naked and breathless and totally shattered, plastered to him like wet cling-film and trembling. He’s heavy, but Lister can give him another couple of seconds before he starts complaining.

Before Lister can say anything, Rimmer peels himself away of his own volition, pulling out with a wince, and dropping heavily to lie down beside him. As Rimmer settles, Lister lets out his breath, cheeks puffed, and drums his hands on his stomach. “Not bad,” he says, and rolls his head over to grin across at Rimmer. “I fucking love you, man.”

Rimmer looks back at him, blinking owlishly. “Really?”

Lister feels his face soften. “You idiot,” he says. “Yeah, really. I do.”

The smile that he gets, then, is warm and open and unguarded, and the rush of fondness that sweeps through Lister is almost overwhelming. “Me, too,” Rimmer says earnestly, and the joke is too easy—something about how everyone knows Rimmer’s in love with himself, maybe throw in a masturbation joke as well for a flourish, something-something-something—but Lister leaves it there. He doesn’t want to ruin this.

Instead, he squirms in closer to Rimmer and kisses him again, sweet and slow, and when Rimmer lifts one arm to create a space for him there, Lister squashes himself into Rimmer’s side. He pillows his head on Rimmer’s chest, slinging an arm lazily across his middle, and rests there. Under his cheek is the gentling rise and fall of Rimmer’s breathing, the steady kick-drum of his pulse.

For a while, Lister just lies there in silence, just listening, and then he says softly, “Weird that it still does that.”

“Hm?”

Lister trails his fingers over Rimmer’s skin. “Your heart.”

A beat passes as Rimmer takes this in. There is the rustle of sheets as he turns his head slightly, and Lister feels Rimmer’s chin bump the top of his head. “What—because I’m dead?”

“Well… I mean, yeah.”

Rimmer exhales through his nose and doesn’t immediately have an answer. His thumb rubs a reassuring, absent-minded pattern on the ball of Lister’s shoulder. “I don’t feel dead anymore,” he says, at last.

Lister props himself up on his elbow to lean over Rimmer and he smirks down at him. “Oh, ey? Do I make you feel alive, Rimmer?”

“Oh, piss off,” Rimmer says, with a roll of his eyes, but there is still that smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“Do I make your little corpse heart soar?” Lister teases. “Do I take your breath away, do I?”

Rimmer takes a deep breath, visibly revving himself up for a big, sarcastic tirade, and Lister watches in delight. “Oh, yes, indeed, Listy—you play an immeasurable role in delaying the process of putrefaction,” he says. “Every word out of your mouth does wonders in scaring away the maggots attempting to rent a holiday cottage in my mouldering flesh—although that might just be the effect of your breath—”

“Bet I could make a fortune as an exterminator, then.”

“—and at the very moment when I feel rigor mortis setting in, your mere presence turns me soft and malleable again—”

Lister arches his eyebrows. “Never had that complaint before,” he says smugly, and he is fully expecting it when Rimmer shoves at him. He flops back down at Rimmer’s side, but rolls over to rest his chin on Rimmer’s chest and looks up at him. For a moment, he is quiet, studying Rimmer from this angle until Rimmer feels his gaze and looks back at him. After a second, he asks hesitantly, “Does that still… bother you?”

Rimmer’s brow furrows. “Does what bother me?” he asks, and Lister can almost watch the gears turning behind his eyes as he replays their conversation, tries to find the central thread of what has Lister so uncertain. “What, being dead? Not existing except as a computer programme?” He pauses. “Not really, no.”

“Really?” Lister’s glad to hear it, he is, but it seems—unexpected. The idea that Rimmer could just shrug away the chip on his shoulder and decide that it’s not worth resenting anymore.

“In my humble opinion, I am far, far better at being dead than I was at being alive.” Rimmer ticks off his fingers to illustrate the point: “I’ve got a sex-life, I’ve got people I might very loosely refer to as friends, I’m three millions years away from my parents, I’m in command of my own ship—”

“Well,” Lister says.

“—and even my hair is less of a nightmare now that I’m a walking corpse.” Rimmer holds out his free arm with a gleeful smile. “I’m on a roll, baby!”

Lister shakes his head, letting out a low laugh. “Yeah, I guess you’re doing alright, aren’t you? Not bad for a guy made entirely of light.”

“I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective,” Rimmer says, eyes fixed on the bunk above them. “Yes, I’m dead and I don’t exist, of course there’s all that—but I’ve done a lot more with my non-life than I ever did with the real thing. So what does it matter if I’m not, technically speaking, real?”

Lister says it without thinking: “You’re real to me, man.” He doesn’t mean for his voice to come out in that low, gentle murmur either, and when Rimmer looks down at him, there is surprise in his face, along with the embarrassed flush at his jaw.

“Well,” Rimmer says, squirming. “Thanks.” The arm curled round Lister’s shoulders tightens, and when he adds, “You really do say the sweetest things, Listy,” it only sounds half sarcastic.

“So, what, you really wouldn’t want to be alive again? If you could just snap your fingers—”

“But it wouldn’t _be_ like that,” Rimmer cuts in. “It wouldn’t be like ordering a pizza—dial this number and get resurrected within a lukewarm forty-five minute window. I’d get wiped and some jumped-up ponce would be back in my place. He wouldn’t remember anything after taking a Cadmium bomb to the face. None of the last six years would have happened for him. He wouldn’t have any clue about—well, about anything, about falling in love with you—he’d probably still be worried about ironing his socks.”

Lister raises his eyebrows. “You still iron your socks.”

“Well—yes, but I’m at least self-aware,” Rimmer argues, and Lister smothers his laugh into Rimmer’s armpit. “I’ve grown! I have, I care about other things now—”

“Yeah, you’re way more into Space Corps Directives now.”

“—I have hobbies—”

“Broadening your catalogue of wank material to include men is not a _hobby_ , Rimmer—”

“—and I am, overall, a much more well-rounded person!”

“Rimmer, in the nicest possible way, you are about as well-rounded as a cube.”

“That’s rich,” Rimmer scoffs, “coming from the man who has only ever eaten one meal for the last six years.”

“And the rest,” Lister points outs, and Rimmer rolls his eyes. “Anyway—I’ve eaten spaghetti tonight! I’ve got range.”

“That’s true.” Rimmer hesitates, pursing his lips thoughtfully, and then goes on, tentative, “Do you think we should, er… tidy up downstairs?”

“Bagsy not me,” Lister blurts out instantly, just a hair ahead of Rimmer’s frantic, “Bagsy n— _bollocks_!”

Lister laughs, pointing in his face.

“I’m not doing it, I refuse! I’m not the one who threw everything on the floor.”

“But Rimmer, Bagsy is sacred,” Lister protests, exaggeratedly earnest, and Rimmer makes a valiant effort at suffocating him with a stray pillow. “Rimmer—Rimmer, wait—if we don’t obey the laws of Bagsy, what’s next? You can’t break a _rule_ , you’re not built for it—”

“I can’t break a rule, but I can break you,” Rimmer threatens, although the vehemence in his voice is undermined by the tilt of his smile.

“Is that a promise?” Lister teases, as he swats him away, and he reaches up to push back the sweat-damp curls from Rimmer’s forehead and fist a hand loosely in them. He drops his voice stupidly low, a growling over-exaggerated impersonation of getting fired up. “Ooh, come on, tiger, break me.”

“Shut up,” Rimmer says, “shut up, shut up,” and he rolls him over to kiss him quiet, and Lister grins into it.

***

On the days when Lister wakes up on the wrong side of the bunk and a combination of a bad tummy-ache, a splitting headache, or a case of last-man-alive-itis leaves him quietly simmering with a nameless fury—those days, a fight needs picking. It’s the same thing that used to drive him down to an unfamiliar pub and start getting rowdy, or to go mouthing off at Man United fans, or ringing round the houses of old girlfriends when they’ve got their new fella over.

The only problem is that nowadays there’s none of that. No pubs, no football, no human race. No anything, except for infinity and space and the four of them, and everything seems fine-tuned to wind Lister right up until he’s kicking skirting-boards and snapping at vending-machines.

The Cat eats too loud; Kryten is constantly underfoot with a duster; Rimmer keeps chuckling fondly and clucking his tongue at his book of Julius Caesar’s Gallic campaigns; the Cat has torn one of Lister’s favourite Hawaiian shirts into ribbons because he wanted to create a fringe for the sleeves of his suede jacket; Kryten has recently begun experimenting with puns and keeps saying that they need to keep canned vegetables in the cockpit in case they meet any real aliens and need to tell them that they _come in peas_ ; Rimmer kicks Lister out of bed for eating crisps; Rimmer accuses Lister of nicking his favourite pen; Rimmer tosses Lister’s comfiest, most well-worn bed socks into the disposal unit; Rimmer exists.

Lister loves him, he loves him, he chants it in his head like a mantra, over and over, like it’s the flimsy deadbolt barricading the path of his own irritation, but Christ alive, sometimes Rimmer needs a kick in the teeth.

On those days—when Lister is seething with directionless rage—Rimmer makes for a perfect target. If Lister needs a fight, at least he knows that pissing Rimmer off is a sure thing, and it doesn’t even take very much. A well-timed belch, a bogey flicked carefully towards the ceiling, a few choruses of _Lunar City 7_ tunelessly belted out while Rimmer is reading or revising or organising his socks—any one of these could drive Rimmer ballistic, let alone a combination.

So Lister does it all. He squeezes toothpaste from the middle, leaves wet teabags in the sink, abandons dirty dishes on every surface, warms up his dirty, crusty socks on the radiator to unleash the thickest of the scent, and… nothing. Rimmer goes about his days, complaining roughly the same amount as usual, and that’s it. There’s no special venom directed towards Lister, not even when he props his bare feet on the table next to Rimmer’s sandwich. Rimmer just uses the back end of his knife to push Lister’s foot across the table until it falls off the end, and he doesn’t even so much as look up.

He’s almost _mellow_ , now, Lister realises in horror, and Lister can’t tell if it’s the age or the shagging or something else besides, but while he’s as generally whiny as ever, he just doesn’t rise to the bait like he used to.

It’s okay—it’s fine. It doesn’t have to be as bad as all that. He can still wind Rimmer up; he just needs to try another angle.

One morning, he goes for it.

“Rimmer, can you stop that?”

“Stop what?” Rimmer asks absently, as he fiddles about with an empty tube of toothpaste. For the last nine minutes or so, he has been meticulously trying to eke out every last atom of toothpaste from a tube that now curls in on itself like a desiccated hedgehog corpse—and it’s worth noting than in all that time, he still hasn’t actually managed to round up enough toothpaste to cover his toothbrush bristles.

“Stop dicking about rationing toothpaste—it’s empty, it’s done. You won’t get your money back if you eat the tube as well, you know.”

“Maybe so, but I’m not going to throw it away when it still contains good toothpaste.”

“I’ll give you a hint,” Lister says. “If you have to spend ten minutes scraping it forwards from the very corners, it’s smegging empty.”

“Well, perhaps if you didn’t waste such monumental quantities by smearing it everywhere and firing half of it all over the mirror and the sides of the sink, perhaps it would last a bit longer.”

“How did this get turned back on me?” Lister demands. “You’re such a stingy bastard.”

Rimmer tuts but doesn’t look up. “Well, someone needs to be,” he says mildly. “We don’t have infinite supplies, you know. There’s no magic toothpaste tree to fall back on.”

Lister starts tearing his hair out. “God, Rimmer, what is _wrong_ with you?”

Rimmer sets down the toothpaste and turns around. “What?”

“Mr. Zen, Mr. Calm and Collected Dalai Lama—did you not hear me call you a stingy bastard?”

“Yes, I did,” Rimmer says.

“You’re stingier than my nan serving out seconds. You’re tighter than a drag queen’s leotard. You’re stingy as—as—” Lister flounders helplessly. “Come on, man.”

Rimmer just looks at him, bewildered and—if Listers’ not imagining what that particular tilt of his mouth means—sort of hurt. “I don’t really know what you’re playing at,” he says, which is a familiar enough line, but normally has a touch more venom behind it.

Just like that, Lister deflates, all the fight sapped out of him. He drops to sit on the edge of Rimmer’s bed like a dejected marionette.

“Now, far be it from me to lecture anyone on healthy behaviour,” Rimmer says stiffly, “but it strikes me that goading the people who care about you into a fight perhaps doesn’t resolve the issues you hope it will.”

Lister lifts his head, but for a moment he’s got nothing to say to that. He drags both hands down his face, pressing his fingers against his eyelids like maybe gouging out his own eyes will snap him out of this funk, and he sighs. Rimmer’s right. God, Rimmer is actually _right_ for once, and Lister hates that, but for once he’s talking sense—this doesn’t fix anything.

“Pissing you off used to be like breathing for me,” Lister says eventually. “Half the time it was the only thing what kept me going.”

“Yes, and I used to spend most of my adolescence scrapbooking Page 3 girls,” Rimmer says with an eye roll. “In your own words—God forbid any of us mature and grow.”

Lister wrinkles his nose. “Yeah, but—I don’t wanna mature and grow,” he says, fully aware of how petulant he sounds.

“You already have, you useless gimboid,” Rimmer points out. “I mean, only the other day, I saw you eating an apple—”

“Alright, keep your voice down,” Lister hisses.

Rimmer holds up both hands in surrender. “All I’m saying is, don’t go hammering in holes in a canoe because you miss the excitement of drowning.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Rimmer protests, and he crosses the room to Lister. He sits on the bed beside him, bumps him with his shoulder, and takes a long, slow moment before he says anything further. “Look—you’re right. We used to fight non-stop. I used to spend ninety percent of my energy shouting at you. You used to pass every day trying to devise new ways to wind me up. In your own words: were you happier, then?”

Lister doesn’t say anything to that; they both already know the answer. It’s just that there’s something terrifying about this—knowing that they’ve both changed almost beyond recognition, knowing he can’t picture his life without Rimmer in it. At last, he just mutters, “Smeg,” and he drops his forehead onto Rimmer’s shoulder.

“My thoughts exactly,” Rimmer says.

Lister muffles a groan into the fabric of Rimmer’s jacket, because he’s still wound up and annoyed and buzzing for a barney, but it’s a futile urge, and the longer he sits here with Rimmer, the less urgent it feels. Then Rimmer shifts, lifting his arm to curl round Lister’s shoulders—in the process, tilting Lister down into him so that he ends up with his face mostly pressed into Rimmer’s armpit.

“Come on, you stupid git,” Rimmer says. “Come here.”

Lister makes another noise of complaint, but he does shunt over to lean properly into Rimmer, his head pillowed on Rimmer’s chest, and Rimmer’s hand finds its way up to the nape of Lister’s neck. His fingers are cool and soft as they smooth through the fine baby hair there, a steady, repetitive, absent-minded motion that simmers Lister’s bad temper into a begrudging quiet peace. Without thinking about it, Lister’s eyes close as he leans into it.

“Will you calm down now?” Rimmer asks, his voice lower and gentler.

“Mmghf,” Lister says.

“Would it help if I insulted you?” Rimmer pauses, considering. His fingers trace slow circles in the back of Lister’s hair, his palm warm against the back of Lister’s neck. “You’re an imbecile, Lister. A hopeless case. A gerbil-faced munchkin with all the dignity of…” He trails off, _erm-_ ing and _ah_ -ing over the possibilities.

“A verruca?” Lister suggests, voice muffled into Rimmer’s jacket.

“Oh, good one. I might save that one for the Cat, though.”

“D’you wanna write it down?”

“No, no, I’ll remember it. If not, I’m sure you can prompt me.”

“You know you’re getting old when you need an understudy to be a dick to your mates,” Lister comments, and Rimmer scoffs, but his hand in Lister’s hair doesn’t so much as falter. Over and over, a soothing pattern on Lister’s skin, blind shapes of comfort, and Lister breathes easier.

***

Normally, they’d agree that the risks of a salvage mission like this one outweigh the rewards, but things aboard _Starbug_ are starting to look dicey.

Yes, the derelict in question sits snug in the middle of a fast-moving asteroid belt; yes, prior asteroid strikes have already knocked the derelict loose so that one more solid whack by anything larger than a carrier pigeon is liable to jettison it off wildly into the distance; and _yes,_ the planetoid orbited by said asteroid belt is gaseous, storm-ridden, and prone to heat surges which would leave them all crispier than Rimmer’s hair gel, organs and all—but it’s that or suffocate, so needs must.

For the last three weeks, the oxy-generation unit has been making that funny sputtering noise, and Lister’s regular check-ups doesn’t seem to have improved anything—the last time he performed his usual maintenance routine of twatting it with a mallet, the noise didn’t even falter, so clearly they’re navigating the S.S. Smeg without a sail. Worse still, the other day Kryten got hit with one of those impeccably timed, inarguable system updates, so he’s ship-bound until further notice.

No-one is more pleased by this development than Rimmer, who would otherwise be consigned to the duty of Sitting In the Cockpit and Bricking It By Proxy, and who now instead peers around the derelict with an expression usually reserved for Lister’s laundry basket.

He sniffs disdainfully. “They needn’t have tidied up on our account,” he mutters as he nudges at a buckled sheet of metal panelling with his toe.

“I’ve seen portaloos kept cleaner than this,” the Cat complains, picking through the tangle of wires and incomprehensible warped mess of rusted machinery. “Hell, I’ve seen Gerbilface keep his floordrobe tidier.”

Lister pulls a face, but the Cat’s not wrong. Before he can protest in self-defence, the radio at Lister’s belt crackles and Kryten’s voice comes through.

“Excuse me, sirs,” he says, sounding tinny and distant, but clearly concerned. “I just thought I should make you aware—there’s something coming through the belt and it looks liable to clip the derelict’s starboard side. I’m looking into whether you’d likely survive the impact, but it’s not looking good. Predicted impact in thirteen minutes.”

Lister swears under his breath. “Smeg—alright, thanks for the heads-up.” He lifts his head to look between Rimmer and the Cat. “So, ten minutes before we head back? We can split up and make better time.”

Rimmer gulps. “Wouldn’t it be more expedient for us to skedaddle a touch sooner—say, for example, right now? Post-haste? Immediately?”

Lister pats him on the shoulder as he passes him in the narrow corridor. “Come on, coward. Let’s get it done.”

They divide and conquer, each manning a large duffel bag for any useful findings and moving hastily through each room in search of anything worth pilfering. The derelict is a small exploration vessel, kitted out to be largely automated, or else supervised by a very small crew of technicians and engineers while being remotely piloted; their best shot at finding components to repair the oxy-generation unit are probably either the science room or the engine rooms—delegated to the Cat and Rimmer, respectively—but Lister is more on a general salvage mission. He’s long since got used to life aboard _Starbug,_ the weird routines and constant effort to find new, inventive ways of passing time, but God, it would go easier if there was more variety. Different food, different films, different board games, _anything._

Lister rummages through drawers and cabinets in search of anything to liven up the mundanity of day-to-day existence in deep space, but as the ship is mainly automated, there’s hardly anything left around by the guys who once staffed it. A few trinkets here and there, some music (mostly crap), some very stale biscuits, and an assortment of food shrink-wrapped for longevity, but Lister doesn’t know how much of it will actually be edible.

Then, as he’s rifling through what counts as some kind of pantry, Lister comes across something that makes him break out in a grin of open delight.

“You’ve gotta be smegging kidding me,” he laughs as he stashes his findings in his jacket. “Rimmer is gonna go absolutely spare.”

The rest of the cupboard provides little of interest—an old multipack of cheese and onion crisps, a few cartons of long-life milk that he tucks into his duffel bag, and some vegetable stock-cubes which will probably come in handy at some point. There is a pile of old magazines tucked into an overhead compartment, but when Lister stretches up to flick through, it’s pretty boring. As he pulls out a battered copy of _Cranes Today_ to peruse, the radio hisses into life again.

“Quick update, sirs,” Kryten’s voice comes crackling through. “It’s not just another asteroid—it looks like part of a satellite that has become pulled into the planetoid’s gravity field, and as a result it’s moving substantially faster than I originally estimated. At current speed, I predict it will clip the asteroid in just under seven minutes.”

Lister clicks the radio to respond. “Good to know, cheers. I’ll grab the others and we’ll start heading back pronto.” He tucks the magazine into the collar of his shirt, grabs the others—yeah, they look dull as piss, but chances are there’s something in there just boring enough for Rimmer, and heaven only knows they’ve all read everything else on _Starbug_ thirty times over—and returns down the corridor in search of the rest of the crew.

As Lister navigates the long, narrow corridor back to where he left the Cat and Rimmer, he becomes aware that the walls are already starting to shake, almost imperceptibly were it not for the squeak of metal on metal where the warped wall panels don't quite fit right.

He reaches down for the radio and taps on for Kryten. “Hey, Kryten,” he asks. “Are you sure on that timer? Because things are hotting up in here. The walls are wobbling more than Yoko Ono’s vocals.”

There is a squeal of static, and then Rimmer’s voice comes blaring through. “ _I smegging well hope he’s sure on that timer otherwise we’re all going to be cooked in our skins like big ugly jacket potatoes, and personally I don’t feel quite ready for the butter-and-baked beans phase of my life—”_

Lister rolls his eyes. “Keep your knickers on, Rimmer, we’ll be fine. Kryters?”

“How long do you think it will take for you to return to _Starbug_?” Kryten asks tentatively.

In his head, Lister runs through the layout of the derelict, retracing his steps, accounting for the time it’ll take to get his helmet back on and for the airlock to depressurise and let him out, plus the time for the space-walk. “Couple of minutes, maybe?”

“Ah.” Kryten clears his throat delicately. “Suggest you activate Run Mode, sirs.”

Lister swears under his breath and hurries to a jog. He turns down the volume on Rimmer’s frantic squawking and just focuses on getting back to the airlock as quickly as possible. He can get suited and booted while he waits for the others even if the Cat and Rimmer aren’t back yet, and then—and then—he tries not to wander any further down the mental pathway of what happens if the Cat and Rimmer don’t come back. 

When he reaches the airlock, he makes quick work of reattaching his oxygen supply, zipping his suit up over his jacket, and then he stands there helplessly, his helmet in one hand, staring down the far corridor and trying not to get into a tizzy about it.

He clicks the radio on. “Rimmer, Cat? Where are you?”

There is a splutter of static.

He tries again. “Come in, Cat, Rimmer—”

The radio squeals. “Yeah, I’m here, buddy, I’m nearly with you,” the Cat says easily.

“You find anything?”

“Let me see,” the Cat says. “A handful of those filter valves that we’re always in need of, the replacement compressor for the oxy-generation unit, and a floor-length mirror with excellent lighting.”

“Oh, brutal. How’s it looking?”

“Artfully tousled, a little rugged—but the overall effect is still dazzling.”

Lister knocks the butt of his radio against his forehead a few times. He sighs. “The compressor, you doink.”

“Oh, that’s fine, too.”

Lister lifts the radio to his mouth again. “You seen Rimmer?”

“What?”

“Rimmer, Cat. Have you seen him?”

“Not since we split up, no,” the Cat says, and his voice becomes clearer, less crackly, and then he rounds the corner. His arms are laden with mechanical components that wouldn’t fit in his duffel bag, but Lister has room for the remainder in his own bag. “Still, things are looking up! Maybe he’ll never come back.”

The radio hisses at Lister’s hip. “Sirs, we need to go,” Kryten calls through the static. “Impact in two minutes!”

Lister brings the radio back to his mouth. “Kryten, we’ve lost Rimmer,” he explains hurriedly. “I’m going to find him.”

“But, sir, we don’t have time—”

“I’m not just gonna leave him, Kryten.”

“Are you sure I can’t convince you?” the Cat tries, and Lister doesn’t dignify that with an answer, but instead pushes the Cat towards the airlock.

“Get suited up and ready to go,” Lister says. “I’ll be right back.”

He sets off at a run down the corridor. The last Lister heard from him, Rimmer was heading to the science room, and Lister heads that way as quickly as he can—but as he gets close, he can hear a tell-tale grunting and straining from one of the side rooms.

“Rimmer?” Lister calls.

“Hang on—” Rimmer’s voice squeaks through the door. “One second, I’m nearly—”

“Rimmer, what’re you—” Lister bangs the door open and he stops dead. “Rimmer?”

At the moment, Rimmer is folded awkwardly behind a large freezer-chest, mostly upside-down, looking dishevelled and frantic. His arm disappears almost to the elbow under the freezer. On the floor, distinctly out of reach, is his radio. “Ah,” he says pleasantly. “Afternoon, Listy. I seem to be stuck.”

“Smeg’s sake,” Lister says. He hastens over to haul the freezer-chest up off Rimmer’s arm, and drag him out from behind it. “What’re you playing at? We have to go, _now_.”

“The freezer is full of ready-meals,” Rimmer protests. “We have to take it with us!”

Lister fists a hand into Rimmer’s sleeve and drags him out into the corridor. “We don’t have time, man—we’re T-minus-two to getting blasted out of the sky by a satellite. We need to—”

Not quite two minutes, as it turns out, when Lister gets cut-off mid-sentence by the impact.

It feels as though the room is picked up and roughly shaken like a pair of die, and then Lister goes flying arse-over-tit. He crashes down with a bang, landing head-first, and then lies back dazed for a moment while he waits for the room to right itself. He blinks and waits longer. Then longer still. The room is still upside down, and when Lister heaves himself to sit upright, he sees that he is, technically speaking, sitting on the wall, except the wall is now the floor and the ceiling is now a wall and it’s all very disorienting. Worse still, Lister’s head is pounding with a vicious throbbing pain, and there is a smear of blood along one of the wall panels. Make that floor panels, actually. Or ceiling panels. Smeg. 

“Rimmer? Rimmer, you okay?”

From somewhere behind him, Rimmer emits a low groan.

Lister gropes for his radio. “Kryten, are you there?” he asks, and then, idiotically, “Are we alive?”

“Yes, we are, sir,” Kryten reports back. “For now, at least. That’s the good news. The bad news is that another piece of the satellite debris is coming around. The worse news is that it will almost certainly decimate your position. Impact predicted in thirty-two minutes.”

“Is that actually thirty-two minutes?” Lister asks. He wrinkles his nose as he becomes aware of the slow trickle of sweat down into his eyebrow. “Or thirty-two minutes like thirteen ended up being five?”

Kryten is silent for a beat. “I’ll try to keep my predictions as accurate as possible,” he says apologetically, and Lister swears again.

Nothing else for it, then. He rights himself, stumbling and staggering to lean his weight against the wall—ceiling—floor? and turns around to find Rimmer crumpled in an inelegant heap a few feet away. “Rimmer?”

Slowly, Rimmer picks himself up, blinking, disoriented. “Are we alive?”

“Just about.”

Rimmer shakes himself. “Right. Let’s go, then, before—” he starts to say, and then he looks at Lister, and all the colour slowly drains from his face. He swallows thickly. “Lister,” he says faintly, pointing a wavering finger at his own forehead, “I think you might be injured.”

Lister runs a hand over his forehead and his fingers come away slick with blood. “I think you might be right.” When he reaches up to probe further, he finds what can only be described as a _flap_ of skin near his hairline, and he feels warmth trickling down into his eyebrows, and that’s when Rimmer keels over.

He lands with a crash, out cold, his face gone grey, and Lister swears at length. Great. Now he’s got a head injury _and_ Rimmer unconscious to deal with, like it wasn’t bad enough that he’s now got a gory shortcut to his frontal lobe.

Lister crouches next to him and shakes his shoulder. “Rimmer,” he hisses. “Rimmer! For smeg’s sake, wake up.” As he leans over him, a thick glob of blood drips from his hairline and lands with a splatter on Rimmer’s cheek, which probably doesn’t help.

In a moment of idiotic bravado, Lister grabs Rimmer by the arm and the thigh to try and drag him up into some kind of fireman’s lift, without considering the fact that he has done absolutely no exercise in the last three million years, and so he gets Rimmer up to about waist-height and then drops him. Rimmer’s forehead smacks the ground hard, and Lister winces. He is definitely making this worse.

Lister fumbles for his radio. “Cat?” he calls into it. “Cat, come in.”

No answer. Of course not. _Smeg_. At least if Rimmer was still soft-light, Lister could just grab his light-bee and make a run for it.

He lowers the radio and tries it the old-fashioned way. “Cat!” he yells down the corridor. “Oi, Cat!”

At Lister’s side, the radio crackles again. Lister grabs at it feverishly, but Kryten’s voice comes through instead: “Pardon my impatience, sirs, but may I ask what is taking so long?”

Lister swears again before he goes for the transit switch. “Rimmer’s out cold, Kryten. I can’t really carry him on me own—I’m bashing his head against everything in sight at the minute—and the Cat’s not here. Can you hail him and get him down here?”

“Right away, sir.”

With a sigh, Lister sets his radio back in its holster and goes instead for the bandana knotted around his neck. He yanks it free, and hastily ties it in a thin strip round his head, in an effort both to stem the flow of blood and to cover up the gore. “I know I say sometimes you’re a bit of a deadweight,” Lister tells Rimmer’s limp body, “but I didn’t expect you to take it quite this literally.”

He shoulders Rimmer’s bag, grabs him by the ankles, and starts unceremoniously dragging him along the ground in the direction of the airlock. As far as he can, he tries to keep Rimmer from getting too bashed about—mostly—muttering _sorry, Rimmer_ each time his head lolls over to one side and clonks against a wall-fitting. Around them, the derelict shakes and rumbles, more unstable since the first satellite strike, and Lister isn’t calling Kryten a liar, but he’s starting to feel a bit sceptical of his timings.

There is a clatter somewhere behind Lister, and then the Cat’s irritated muttering can be heard: “—always desperate for me to come and save their scrawny butts—what would they do if I weren’t around all the time to—”

“Cat!” Lister shouts. “Down here—Rimmer’s wiped out. We’ll have to carry him.”

“Carry him?” the Cat echoes, nose wrinkling as he clambers over debris to reach them. “No way,” he says. “I’m not doing that.” Then, without further ado, he winds his arm right back and smacks Rimmer across the face. It seems like less of a slap and more of a punch to the jaw, but it does the trick: Rimmer reels, blinks, and comes groggily to.

Lister winces. “Cat!”

“Mmgh,” Rimmer mumbles. “No, thank you, I’m avoiding red meat.”

“Rimmer, wake up,” Lister urges, grabbing him by the front of his jacket and shaking him. As Rimmer sits up, swaying unsteadily, the Cat grabs Rimmer by the sleeve and hauls him up onto his feet, and Lister braces a shoulder into Rimmer’s armpit to take some of his weight. “Come on, smeghead, we’ve gotta go.”

With only a half-hearted grumble of complaint, Rimmer takes the blow to his pride alongside Lister’s help, and they stumble back to the airlock.

It takes a few minutes longer than they’d planned to get back into their space-walk suits, Lister wrestling his helmet over his hat, Kryten chivvying them along all the way with increasingly frantic updates on their time until impact, and once they’re out onto the asteroid’s surface, Rimmer argues that he is well enough to stand on his own, but when Lister keeps his hand in his own, their fingers awkwardly tangled in their bulky spacesuit gloves, he is curiously quiet.

When they get back on board _Starbug_ , Kryten is already starting up the engines ready to take-off. “Welcome back,” he calls through as the airlock depressurises. “Nine minutes to impact—please, sirs, could we make an attempt at going just a tiny bit faster?”

“Cat, can you watch Rimmer?” Lister asks as he twists his helmet off.

“I don’t need watching,” Rimmer protests, and promptly falls down.

“See, he doesn’t need watching,” the Cat says.

“Cat—”

“I know I’m luminous and full of youthful energy, but do I _look_ like a babysitter?” the Cat says indignantly, and huffs. “No way. I’ll get this tin can up in the air—you can chaperone Captain Lily-Liver.”

Without waiting for Lister to agree, the Cat strides off towards the cockpit, leaving Lister surrounded by all their salvaged findings, his head throbbing, blood seeping slowly but surely through his bandana, and Rimmer sitting in a heap in the floor as he tries to get his bearings.

“Right,” Lister says, pulling himself together as he feels the engines gunning as _Starbug_ starts to lift, and he snaps his fingers at Rimmer. “Head between your knees. Deep breaths, nice and slow. Don’t move.”

Rimmer blinks, swaying woozily. “Between _my_ knees? I’ll give it a go, but I’m not as bendy as you think.”

There isn’t time for Lister to deal with the layers and layers of idiocy that Rimmer is operating on right now, so he just skips easily past that. He pats Rimmer encouragingly on the shoulder and starts organising all of the rubbish they’ve nicked. First priority is trying to wrangle something functional out of the odds and sods that Cat found for the oxy-generation unit.

As he’s digging through the various bags, the ship begins to stabilise, the frenetic rattle of metal slowing to a hum, and Kryten calls back to them from the cockpit. “Well, as ever, sirs, I commend your ability to really push safety to its absolute extremes,” Kryten says cheerily, “to find the vanishing point of sensible behaviour and just push that extra bit further.”

“Alright, alright, give it a rest,” Lister says, creating three piles of crap for the engine room, medical bay, and kitchen respectively. “We got out okay, didn’t we? Rimmer’s coming round and to be honest, I don’t even think I’ll need stitches or anything.”

“Stitches?” Kryten echoes.

“Yeah, there’s just a sort of flap of skin, but I reckon we can just glue it back down—”

Kryten’s voice shoots higher. “Flap?!”

“Please, stop talking,” Rimmer groans from between his own legs.

“Aw, don’t make a big fuss over nothing,” Lister says. “It’s not that bad—Rimmer is just wet, that’s all.”

Later, it transpires that Rimmer is not just wet—of course, he still is, but Lister _does_ need stitches. Kryten takes a look at his forehead in the medical bay, and deems that he should be fine with just three stitches and a shot of one of their fast-acting skin-knit capsules to smooth it all over, although Kryten still forces Lister to wear a big plaster on his head for a few days, just in case. When Lister tries to argue that it looks naff, Kryten lowers his voice and says solemnly, “Do it for Mr. Rimmer, sir,” and Lister can’t really argue with that one. 

As it happens, _Mr. Rimmer_ is hovering nervously on the other side of the door, intermittently calling through, “Is it safe? Can I come in?”

“A head injury isn’t contagious, dickhead,” Lister says, sitting on the edge of the medical cot, kicking his feet. “Get in here.”

Rimmer pokes his head through the doorway. “All the blood’s gone, yes?”

“Yeah,” Lister says, and then he looks at Rimmer and recants his answer. “Well.” There is still a big splotch of Lister’s blood dried onto his cheek, but Lister decides he just won’t mention it. “Mostly.”

Luckily, Rimmer’s still not at full-wattage for pedantry and nit-picking, and that goes over his head. He comes in, neatly sidestepping Kryten, and stands near the head of the medical cot, his arms folded across his chest. “Everything tickety-boo, Kryten?” he asks. “Humpty-Dumpty all back together again?”

“Hey,” Lister protests.

“Yes, sir, he’s just fine.”

“You were careful with his brain-cell, weren’t you?” Rimmer checks, leaning in close in a totally unnecessary performance of concern. “He does need it, sometimes, and he’s only got the one.”

“Smeg off,” Lister tells him. He pulls his hat back on, tugging the band down over the massive chunk of gauze on his forehead. “We’re still not out of the asteroid belt yet, you know—shouldn’t you be hiding somewhere?”

“If the occasion does arise, there’s room in the medical supply cupboard,” Kryten offers. “Enough space for a good, sustained panic as long as you’re careful not to bang your head on the shelves.”

“Enough space for me to dismantle you, as well, I suppose,” Rimmer says brightly.

“I’m sure there’s ample room for dismantling, but I should warn you that I’m due back at the helm with the Cat at quarter-past, and even excluding the time it takes to retrieve the screwdriver, it does take eleven minutes to take my essential components apart.”

Rimmer smiles inanely at him. “Give me a hammer and I can do it in five.”

Indignant, Kryten huffs as he tidies away his equipment with a clatter.

“Does it hurt?” Rimmer asks Lister, wearing an expression on his face that suggests he is doing his level best to appear totally unconcerned.

Lister lets out his breath in a dramatic burst, cheeks puffing out, legs swinging off the edge of the cot. “I’ll live.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Rimmer asks, and he holds up a hand to flip Lister off.

“Thirteen,” Lister says, deadpan, and he swats Rimmer’s hand away. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that? You’re the one who keeled over.”

“Yes, but I’m not a concussion risk.”

Kryten and Lister glance at each other, eyes wide. Lister decides that all the times he clocked Rimmer’s unconscious head against the floor should be another one for the pile of things Rimmer’s better off not knowing; he shakes his head minutely and Kryten takes the hint.

“And, erm,” Rimmer says, hands folded neatly before him, “thank you for coming to rescue me.”

“Yeah, couldn’t let you die.” Lister shrugs. “You still owe me a tenner.”

Rimmer’s face creases into a frown. “From when?”

Kryten says, “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“Remember when I lent you the shuttle fare to Mimas?”

“I paid you back for that!”

“You did not—”

“Excuse me, sirs,” Kryten says, trying to squeeze past to leave the medical bay. “Sorry—terribly sorry. Could I just—”

“I did!” Rimmer splutters. “I distinctly recall that two weeks later, you trashed my desk and I said that it was approximately five-thousand dollar-pounds of irreparable damages, but I agreed to let it slide if you would waive the—”

“Five-thousand quid? All you had on it was a pencil and a postcard!”

“Sorry to be a bother, sirs,” Kryten says, “—just—may I squeeze past—”

“But the sentimental value was—”

“You hadn’t even _written_ the smegging postcard yet—”

Kryten is still trying to sidle surreptitiously past. “Mr. Rimmer, sir, if I could just—”

“Either way, you agreed—”

“There is absolutely no way I agreed to that crock of—”

“It’s not my fault if you have a faulty memory—”

“I might have a _concussion,_ you twat—”

“That’s not my problem! Besides, be that as it may, the point still rests that—”

“Smegging hell,” Lister says loudly, “I am so glad that we’ve _matured and grown_ , ey, Rimmer—that we’ve grown into—”

“Sirs, this is absurd,” Kryten bursts out, cutting straight over both of them. “Both of you—you’re as irresponsible as each other!”

Both Lister and Rimmer’s mouth snap shut, startled into silence.

“Yes, of course, Mr. Rimmer has run up a debt to put the Weimar Republic to shame,” Kryten goes on, “but it seems of little consequence anyway, given that you, Mr. Lister, are what human economists have historically referred to as _functionally destitute_ , in no small part as a result of you spending all your wages on the most astonishingly brainless, insensible, moronic garbage available!”

Rimmer and Lister exchange a look, suitably chastised—half penitent, half desperately struggling to bite back a laugh.

“I mean, honestly,” Kryten exclaims, “if all you were going to do with your money was spend it renting _Dumb and Dumber_ from JMC streaming services, no less than twenty-six times, when we already own the movie on VHS _and_ DVD, then maybe you’re better off lending it to Mr. Rimmer!” He throws his hands in the air. “Not least because I don’t see why you even need to watch the movie at all when, for the two of you, it is essentially a nature documentary!”

Lister fights to keep a straight face. “Did you need to get that off your chest, Kryten?” he asks. “Do you feel better now?”

“We’ll invoice you the therapy bill at the end of the week,” Rimmer adds solemnly. “We accept cash, cheques, or reruns of _Dumb and Dumber_.”

Really, Lister doesn’t mean to be obnoxious—the shithead smirk just kind of cracks through.

Kryten heaves a sigh. “I can’t win, can I?”

“I’m sure you could,” Lister says, and he looks over at Rimmer with a thoughtful purse of his lips. “What do you say, Rimmer? You wanna put some money on it?”

Kryten shakes his head and shoulders past, stomping down the stairs to _Starbug’s_ midsection with needless aggression, and Lister cackles.

For a moment, Rimmer looks like he might be considering having fun as well, but then he points a triumphant finger into Lister’s face and crows, “Ha! I win. And anyway—you still owe me a naan bread.”

Lister’s face breaks into a grin. “About that...” To think that in all the madness of trying to get out of the derelict and clear of the asteroid belt, he’d clean forgotten. He unzips his jacket and fishes out the foil packet that he’d stashed on the ship earlier. “Got something for you—think fast.”

Rimmer does not think fast. He gets hit in the face by the packet. “What—Lister!” he squawks, flinching much too late, and then he fumbles to catch hold of it. “What on Io—”

Lister swings one foot up to prop against the nearby cabinet. “Go on, then. Open it.”

Rimmer narrows his eyes. “This is… No,” he says, voice low. “You haven’t. It’s impossible.”

Lister laughs. “Just open it, man.”

Not without suspicion, Rimmer unfolds the tin foil. For a moment, he says nothing, staring down at it in incredulous disbelief; then he gives a laugh that can only be described as a _honk_.

“Where the smeg did you get this?” he splutters, pulling it free of the foil, and waves it right into Lister’s face—a shrink-wrapped peshwari naan bread.

“Off the derelict,” Lister says with a smug grin. “While you were busy trying to wear a fridge-freezer as a bracelet. See,” he adds, and he reaches across to tap the packet, “we’re square now. My debt to you is paid.”

Rimmer lifts his head to stare incredulously at him.

Lister doffs his hat and spreads his arms wide like he’s making a grand gesture, a declaration of love to be received on a flower-laden balcony. “Arnold Rimmer,” he says, all pomp and ceremony, with his most winning smile, “I will shag you for free.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Rimmer says, and he comes to stand between Lister’s knees. “It’s all happening so fast.”

Lister hooks an ankle round the back of Rimmer’s knee to tug him in closer. “Three million years slow enough for you?” he teases. “Tell you what, no, you’re right, better wait til marriage. Slow enough?”

“Now, Listy, let’s not rush into anything rash,” Rimmer says, tipping his head down into Lister’s space so that Lister is almost breathing in the narrow tilt of his smile. “Let’s at least wait until the heat death of the universe before—”

“Hang on—come here,” Lister interrupts, and he sets down his hat on the cot beside him, and Rimmer’s brow furrows, bewildered, as Lister grabs his face in one hand. He licks his own thumb and hastily wipes at the dried blood on Rimmer’s cheek. He has to scrub a bit where it’s gone crusty, and Rimmer pulls a face but doesn’t try to wriggle away from it. At last, when there’s no more trace of it, Lister pats Rimmer’s cheek gently. “Much better.”

Satisfied, Lister slings his arms around Rimmer’s neck, but Rimmer doesn’t immediately come in to kiss him, just eyes him with a sceptical look. “I’ve had blood on my face this entire time,” he says succinctly.

Lister grimaces. “Well...”

“Your blood.”

“I mean, would you rather it was _your_ blood?”

“Actually, I would rather there was no blood on my face, actually,” Rimmer says crossly, “because it’s unhygienic and—”

“The only reason I got blood on your face is ‘cause you fainted and I was trying to carry you back to—”

“How can this be my fault?” Rimmer’s voice is rising. “I was unconscious and vulnerable—utterly helpless—and you took advantage—”

“Took advantage? I didn’t smegging violate you, Rimmer, I just _dripped_ —”

“—completely unable to defend myself from being subjected to the gore and abomination of your exposed skull—”

Lister rolls his eyes. “Christ alive, Rimmer, you should be glad I didn’t tell you about what the Cat did to get you to wake up...”

Rimmer’s nostrils flare. “What did that mangy fleabag do, exactly?” he demands, and just like that—with Lister’s arms still round Rimmer’s neck and his knees either side of Rimmer’s hips—they’re bickering again, because some things never smegging change.

***

It’s late—late enough that Lister can faintly hear the Cat purring in his sleep wherever he’s tucked himself away—and everything is turned down low in what passes for night on board _Starbug._ Kryten is on standby, sitting on a chair in the corner, since Rimmer told him it was creepy to come down the stairs to find a motionless body standing in the middle of the room; there is no hum of heating, no clank of pipes running water, just the low rumble of the engines, and, very quietly, the sound of Hammond Organ music with the volume turned down low.

The lights are reduced to dim strips of orange along the floor, illuminating the way to all emergency stations, and a faint, pale glow from the cockpit. Lister stifles a yawn into his fist and follows the sound of cheesy jazz up to the front, where Rimmer is at the helm amid blue blinking lights.

“Go on, Rimmer, turn it up,” Lister says on the way in—too aware by now that a demand to _turn that crap off_ only results in Rimmer defiantly turning up the volume—and sure enough, Rimmer reaches across to mute the speakers. Lister slaps a hand to Rimmer’s shoulder, then, and when Rimmer tilts his head over to offer Lister his cheek, Lister plops a kiss on him. “You alright? Busy shift?”

Rimmer laces his fingers together and stretches over his head until his back pops, letting out a funny sort of groan as he does. “Oh, non-stop drama and excitement,” he says. “A GELF war tribe here, a slathering murderous death worm there…”

Lister pauses for a beat, considering. “So… smeg all, then.”

“Yep.”

“Sounds about right.” Lister drops into the co-pilot’s seat, the leather creaking in protest. “You ready for your relief shift yet?”

“Depends who the relief is,” Rimmer says, reaching over to enter a flight course for autopilot. “If it’s anyone but you, I can’t be arsed. I hate the changeover period—too much bloody chitchat.”

“What, you mean you don’t want a good old chinwag with Kryten about the new and innovative things he’s discovered he can do with lemon juice?” Lister asks, voice low and scandalised. “ _Rimmer._ ”

“Oh, piss off and die.”

Lister grins. “Not on your life, man.”

“Do you not have a Name That Stain contest you should be taking part in?”

“Nah, they wouldn’t let us compete,” Lister says, and kicks his socked feet up onto the dash. “Said I was overqualified.”

“Now, that I can believe.”

Lister digs into the pocket of his boiler suit for the packet of crisps he nicked from the kitchen, when Kryten told him off earlier for snacking before dinner. Rimmer looks over, intrigued and hopeful, but Lister only grimaces with a rueful shake of his head. “Don’t get too excited,” he warns him. “It’s cheese and onion.”

Rimmer’s face falls. Lister offers him the bag anyway, but he knows that Rimmer hates cheese and onion, so Lister’s not surprised when he wrinkles his nose and refuses.

“Just don’t get crumbs anywhere,” Rimmer warns, and then something beeps alarmingly on the dashboard. “Bollocks,” he mutters, squinting at the flashing panel before him, and he starts tapping at the screen to alter their flight heading. “One second.” He checks the radar on the navicom, flips back to manual control, and half-glances over towards Lister’s side of the dashboard as he starts typing in a new protocol. “Do me a favour, my love, switch the navicom over to inertial, will you?” he says absently.

For a moment, Lister does nothing. He just looks at Rimmer, his face breaking into a tiny, secretive smile, his heart a hot-air balloon behind his ribs—he doesn’t think Rimmer’s even realised—and watches him fiddling with dials and switches to realign their position.

Then Rimmer lifts his head, expectant, and says, “Lister?”

“Yeah—sorry.” Lister flips the switch and decides to say nothing. He keeps that one under his hat. “Switched over.”

Rimmer doesn’t even say thank you, because apparently he can be a closet romantic and can still be an impolite twonk as well, but in his defence, he is trying to fly a spaceship. He’s not half-bad at it, actually, but if Lister tells him that, Rimmer will get flustered and probably crash. Instead, Lister tips crisps into his mouth straight from the bag. He only sort of chokes, a relatively low-level spray of crumbs, and because he’s feeling conscientious, he uses the heel of his sock to wipe the crumbs off the radar.

“Where did you find those, anyway?” Rimmer asks, as he finally gets their flight heading typed in correctly so that they can switch over to autopilot. He flips the switch with emphatic finality and sits back in his chair. “Didn’t think we had any more crisps.”

Through a mouthful of food, Lister says, “We don’t. I found a multipack on the derelict.”

Rimmer pulls a face. “It’s not fair,” he complains. “You got to bring loads of stuff back from that salvage mission, and I brought back sweet sod all.”

“Yeah, because you wanted to bring an entire fridge, Rimmer.”

Lister crumples his empty crisp packet in one hand and goes to stuff it into one of the many nooks around the base of the co-pilot’s seat. At this point, he’s almost got designated compartments for different bits of rubbish—dirty post-kebab napkins in the gap between the cushion and the seat; bottle caps kicked backwards under the metal framework; chocolate wrappers in the hole in the side of the arm-rest where some of the stuffing has begun to leak out. However, before he can stow his rubbish anywhere, Rimmer reaches across and smacks him in the arm.

“Give it here, for God’s sake,” Rimmer says crossly, and then snatches the packet out of Lister’s hand, glowering as he stuffs it into the pocket of his jacket. “If we had it your way, we’d be knee-deep in plastic refuse at every moment of the day. You’d have to climb over a mountain of greasy chip paper just to get to the loo, and scale your way out again. I’ll take it.”

“Cheers, man,” Lister says.

Rimmer grumbles something that is probably supposed to be an insult or dismissal of Lister’s gratitude, but either way, there’s no getting away from the fact that he’s doing something nice, and Lister grins at him.

After a beat, Rimmer says wistfully, “There was shepherd’s pie in that fridge.”

Lister shakes his head with a half-laugh. “Smeg, are you still on about the ready meals?”

“You didn’t get a chance to look in the fridge,” Rimmer exclaims, sounding genuinely bereft. “It was full of food—packed to the rafters! Hundreds, if not thousands, of pre-cooked ready meals—stroganoff, omelette and chips, bangers and mash, you name it.”

“So? What’re you getting all het up about it for?” Lister kicks his feet down from the dash and swivels to face Rimmer full-on. “Just because you _can_ eat a vindaloo every single day with me and the Cat, it doesn’t mean you have to. You don’t even need to eat at all.”

“You don’t _need_ to destroy our ear-drums every time you pick up a guitar,” Rimmer points out, “but you still enjoy it.”

Lister considers this. “Yeah, fair.” He reaches over and slaps his arm. “You’ll get over it, man. We can find mashed potatoes somewhere else, but that one wasn’t worth it.”

“Well, you might not be saying that in three weeks when we’ve run out of food and you’re living off space weevils again.”

“Nah, we’ll be alright.” Lister props his elbows on his knees, looks down at his socks with the hole in the big toe and the wool going loose and bobbly, darned together four or five times already and still running threadbare. Just another thing they have to cobble together or repair ten times over—or wait until the universe tosses a replacement their way. “We’ll find another derelict or a supply station, or I’ll start marinating the Cat in garam masala—but we’ll be alright.”

For a long moment, they are silent. Between them, the green light of the radar blinks intermittently, scanning out into the distance and bringing back nothing for light-years ahead. 

When Rimmer speaks, at last, his voice is quiet. “How much longer do you think we can go on like this?” 

Lister lifts his head. “Like what?”

Rimmer gestures loosely at the window, the flickering lights of distant stars, the expanse of deep space pressing in all around them, bleak and black and lovely and never-ending. “Drifting aimlessly. Constantly on the verge of catastrophe, be it starvation or explosions or getting attacked by space-addled maniacs. Scrambling from one disaster to another.” He trails off. It’s nothing much different from his usual doomsaying, but when he looks over at Lister, the line of his mouth is soft. He looks like he’s made his peace with it. “Until finally our luck runs out.”

Lister frowns. “Who says our luck’s gonna run out? We’ve made it this far, haven’t we? I mean, smeg—who’s to say we can't just defy the odds forever until we can scrape our way back to Earth?”

Rimmer just looks at him. “Let’s be honest. You and I both know that isn’t going to happen,” he says, but his voice is low, gentle, and he reaches across the aisle to thread his fingers through Lister’s.

Lister says nothing. At first, he doesn’t know what to say. He supposes that, deep down, he has known for some time that they would probably never get home, but it’s something that they’ve never said out loud. As long as Lister can remember, this has been the crew’s main and only focus: get back to Earth. Even if there’s nothing left, even if humanity has fizzled out and left nothing more than a carbon smear behind. Even if it’s pointless. Even it kills them getting there.

Truth be told, Lister can think of better ways to spend the time.

“Yeah,” Lister admits eventually. “I know.” He looks across at Rimmer, whose face is apologetically resigned, and Lister knows that they’re on the same page. “To be honest… going home, even the idea of it—if I had the choice, if it came down to that… between an empty, mould-ridden flat in Liverpool, or this old rustbucket, I think I’ve got all the home I need right here.”

“You old sap,” Rimmer says, and the way he squeezes Lister’s hand is part reassurance, part warning. “Don’t let Kryten hear you call it a rustbucket. I couldn’t face the baking powder concoctions again. The place has only just stopped stinking of vinegar after the last time.”

Lister groans. “Christ, I’d forgotten about that,” he says wonderingly. “Was that also when Kryten decided he needed to polish all the rivets on the outside of the ship? And—”

“And he polished the buckle of his space-walk cord so vigorously that he detached himself—”

“And he floated off, didn’t he? And we had to go get him back,” Lister finishes, snapping his fingers in triumph. “God, it was a nightmare. It could only happen to us.” He pauses. “Then again,” he adds, after a moment of thought, “no-one else for it to happen to, is there?”

Rimmer lets his breath out long and slow. “Suppose not.” He swings their tangled hands idly in the space between their chairs. “So what now? Just keep floating adrift through deep space forever, waiting for something interesting to happen?”

Lister grimaces. “I mean, it’s worked so far, hasn’t it?” He bumps his thumb over the ridge of Rimmer’s knuckles and tilts his head towards the yawning dark through the cockpit window and the scribble of stars. “There’s bound to be loads out there we’ve not seen yet.”

“Based on some of the things we’ve encountered so far, I’m not sure I want to,” Rimmer says drily.

“Aw, course you do,” Lister says, and he grins at Rimmer, tugs at his hand in a kind of see-saw motion as he’s listing off: “Bit more space, few more moons, maybe a collapsing planetoid or two… Some lunatics who want to kill us, obviously…”

Rimmer lifts his eyebrows, but there is that tilt of a half-smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. “You do know how to make it sound exciting.”

Lister gives a helpless shrug. “Hey, I never said it would be glamorous,” he says, twisting his fingers lazily through Rimmer’s, his thumb coming to brush over the skin at the inside of his wrist. “Plus—I bet it’ll be good for a laugh.”

He lifts Rimmer’s hand to his face, kisses his pulse-point, and it’s as easy as anything.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [IT’S COLD OUTSIDE, THERE’S NO KIND OF ATMOSPHERE! I’M ALL ALONE, MORE OR LESS…]
> 
> Thank you for reading! :)


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